214 Cynthia G. Clopper
2007): geography and distinctiveness. The results of the similarity ratings
task thus provide converging evidence with the free classi¿ cation results
for poor mapping between dialect-speci¿ c variation and cognitive dialect
categories, but a consistent pattern of perceptual similarity related to geog-
raphy and phonological distinctiveness.
Taken together, the results of these studies on the perception of dialect
variation suggest that American listeners have rather poorly speci¿ ed dialect
categories. The results of the free classi¿ cation and similarity ratings tasks
suggest that these poorly speci¿ ed categories are not simply the result of a
mismatch between experimenter-provided labels and clusters of speci¿ c pho-
nological properties, but may instead be the result of inconsistent mappings
between phonetic details and dialect labels. That is, the listeners may not have
well-established connections between linguistic variability and cognitive dia-
lect representations, which leads to poor performance in the explicit dialect
perception tasks.
Despite the relatively low levels of performance overall, the linguistic
experience of the listener emerged as an important factor in dialect classi-
¿ cation performance across several different tasks. In particular, region of
origin affected the perception of local varieties such that local varieties were
Figure 8.2 Mean similarity ratings for the same-dialect and different-dialect talker
pairs in the paired comparison perceptual similarity ratings task (Clopper
et al. 2006).