The perceptual consequences of style shifting

Abstract

We focus on the perception of changes in production made by self-identified bidialectal Southern (SUSE) and Mainstream (MUSE) US English speakers, who were recorded reading words in both dialects. Acoustical analysis shows quantifiable changes across the two guises, but that speakers' MUSE guises still looks more Southern than monolingual speakers of MUSE-like dialects, consistent with claims that many bidialectals do not categorically shift between dialects (Hazen 2001). The stimuli were then used in three listening tasks – a lexical decision task, a transcription task and a speeded dialect classification task – and all show evidence that listeners (N = 123) were sensitive to the changes made by the speakers in their two guises. In fact, for the measures of communicative ease (accuracy in lexical decision, transcription accuracy), responses to the MUSE guise of the bidialectal speakers was indistinguishable from those to monodialectal MUSE speakers. For dialect classification, the MUSE guise of the bidialectal speakers is heard as significantly less Southern than their Southern guise, but more Southern than monodialectal MUSE speakers, and there is a significant effect of listener dialect, with Southern listeners more likely to hear the bidialectal MUSE guise as not Southern. The results sugget that self-identified bidialectal speakers likely use different criteria in assessing bidialectalism (intelligibility, in group perception) than linguists, who typically focus on analyzing speech production.