Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype formation 233Speaker nº 1:
Origin: ______________________
What did you observe in his/her pronunciation that makes you think the
speaker is from this area?
What other people or characters do you know who speak this way?The procedure was as follows. The children were asked if they were willing
to participate in a scientific experiment with the purpose of testing their
ability to determine the origin of an unknown speaker. They were requested
to take the task seriously, listen carefully and respond with rigor. The re-
sponse forms, the maps and the questionnaires were distributed and instruc-
tions given as to how to fill them in. Then the speech samples were played
in the order specified above, and after each speaker the panel of listeners
answered the three questions posed regarding origin, significant linguistic
features and social associations. Afterwards experiment 2 on the recogni-
tion of L2 accents was carried out (see section 3 for details) and finally the
additional questionnaire was answered by two out of the three age groups
(cf. section 4 for details).
2.2. Results and discussion
In this subsection we provide and discuss the results that stem from the first
question in the response form: which is the origin of this speaker? The open
questions in the response form will be dealt with separately in section 4
together with data from the questionnaire. The research questions addressed
in this section thus involve:
x When do children begin to pay attention not only to what is said but
also to how it is said?
x When do children begin to systematically store information about sub-
tle differences in pronunciation, generalizing over usage-based events
to form lectal categories?
x How accurate is speech perception at different intervals of age?
x How precise is it at different taxonomic levels?
The data were extracted from the 150 response forms and processed by a
statistician. Table 3 shows the results at the most difficult level: that of
province. As expected, results for this level of granularity were not statisti-
cally significant (except for a few cases as will be shown in Table 5 below)
and no more than 3 out of the 8 fragments were correctly identified by any