title: Children's perception of dialect variation.
abstract: A speaker's regional dialect is a rich source of information about that person. Two studies examined five- to six-year-old children's perception of regional dialect: Can they perceive differences among dialects? Have they made meaningful social connections to specific dialects? Experiment 1 asked children to categorize speakers into groups based on their accent; Experiment 2 asked them to match speakers to (un)familiar cultural items. Each child was tested with two of the following: the child's Home dialect, a Regional variant of that dialect, and a Second-Language variant. Results showed that children could successfully categorize only with a Home vs. Second-Language dialect contrast, but could reliably link cultural items with either a Home vs. Second-Language or a Regional vs. Second-Language dialect contrast. These results demonstrate five- to six-year-old children's developing perceptual skill with dialect, and suggest that they have a gradient representation of dialect variation.
authors.affiliation: Ohio State University.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.affiliation: Ohio State University.
authors.forename: Cynthia G
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Clopper
authors.affiliation: Macquarie University.
authors.forename: John K
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Pate
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception