250 Gitte Kristiansen
we conclude that the success rate cannot be predicted on the basis of objec-
tive linguistic distance alone. There are no purely linguistic reasons why
British English, with 4 main contrastive features, should be identified by
the children less readily than German or Mexican, with fewer salient con-
trasts.
Table 21. Main linguistic differences in speech fragments when contrasted with a
default variety: quantitative overview
Distinctive
featuresExclusive
featuresFrequent
featuresLinguistic
awarenessSocial
awareness
Andalucía 4
Galicia 3
Canarias 4
Argentina 3
Mexico 2
France 4
Germany 3
Br. Eng. 4
Am. Eng. 34.2. Exclusive linguistic features as an objective distance
Our next candidate for a good predictor of the success rate is linguistic
exclusiveness (cf. Kristiansen 2003, 2008). Structural features that are not
shared with other accents are likely to rate high on perceptual salience and
social awareness. Let us recall in this respect that Labov once described
degrees of social awareness in terms of a gradient from social stereotypes to
markers, and finally indicators. Furthermore, as pointed out by Nunberg
(1978) in his book on metonymic reference, the ideal signifier is percep-
tually distinctive and functionally exclusive: forms that relate to several
referents characterize, but forms that relate exclusively to a single referent
identify. An accent with several exclusive structural components should
thus in theory be identified with more ease than an accent with one, or no,
exclusive features. In Table 22 we have marked the features that occur in
only one of the speech fragments under scrutiny. We observe that all the
accents, except for German, exhibit one feature which is not shared by any
of the other lects: see Table 23.