226 Gitte Kristiansen
perspective of a usage-based cognitive dialectology I have been particularly
interested in social cognition, the extent to which phonetic detail is per-
ceived in folk perception and the implications for cognitive dialectology
and phonology.
In general terms I have viewed lectal varieties in terms of prototype cat-
egories and argued (cf. Bybee 2001; Pierrehumbert 2001) that hearers store
and make sense of linguistic detail at the level of phonetics in order to na-
vigate effectively in the social dimension: intraphonemic and transphonem-
ic salient contrasts serve to establish exophoric reference to social categori-
zations and allow for hearers to categorize speakers on the basis of their
speech patterns. Accents are socially diagnostic because linguistic stereo-
types (sets of fairly abstract linguistic schemata capturing the essence of
what an out group speaks like, or more technically speaking: central images
of lectal categories) emerge on experiential grounds in early childhood and
from then on more and more effectively evoke the social categorizations
they originated from. These serve as shortcuts to identification (i.e. from
linguistic stereotype to social category: where is this speaker from?) and
characterization (i.e. from social category to social stereotype: what is this
speaker like?)
In more specific terms, I have argued that a perspective according to
which hearers do have receptive competence of lectal varieties have both
theoretical and practical implications for cognitive phonology. In several
publications (Kristiansen 2003, 2006, 2008) I have called for a usage-based
analysis that will serve to incorporate the social dimension into the theoret-
ical framework and the descriptive analyses to a greater extent
In this chapter we report on a set of studies carried out in 2007 aiming at
a) examining when young children acquire (receptive and active) compe-
tence of lectal varieties and b) discussing possible predictors of the success
rate: how do children acquire this knowledge? How do they learn to corre-
late tokens with types as effectively as they do?
The interest in the first dimension, which is predominantly descriptive,
stems from a debate in cognitive phonology about the existence of passive
competence. As lectal categorization and perception are central to cognitive
dialectology, which is the main topic of this chapter, I was puzzled a num-
ber of years ago to encounter divergent opinions on the part of scholars in
cognitive phonology regarding the existence of lay knowledge about pho-
netic detail (cf. Kristiansen 2003, 2006; Nathan 1996, 2006). For someone
with an interest in the meaningfulness of linguistic structure - and in Cogni-
tive Linguistics as opposed to most other disciplines, meaningfulness is not