284 Raphael Berthele
man and one third native speakers of other languages; none of these stu-
dents had been involved in the project discussed above). I ran the experi-
ment in two similar conditions, once opposing wiiwii vs. waawaa and once
opposing liilii and laalaa. Both pairs hold the consonants constant and vary
the vowels along the vertical dimension. The result again was perfectly
non-ambiguous: between 90% and 100% of the students attribute the –ii–
forms to the figure on the left and the –aa–forms to the figure on the right.^3
Figure 5. The booba-kiki task by Ramachandran/Hubbard 2001
In view of the high consistency in the choice of the “spiky” visual stimuli
chosen for the St. Gallen dialect, we can now hypothesize that there is more
to the stereotype of the “sharp” and unpleasant nature of the St. Gallen
dialect: there may well be a perceptual, synaesthetic correlate between the
high frequency of occurrence of high vowels and the folk linguistic stereo-
type associated with the dialect. The differences between the phonological
systems are perceptually salient, because they involve in many cases not
the existence of totally unknown or inexistent phonemes in one or the other
variety, but rather the contrastive distribution of the phonemes in the pho-
nological system which thus leads to highly contrastive sound patterns in
pairs of words, as exemplified in Table 5 above. It is these contrasts that are
perceptually and thus folk linguistically salient, as Trudgill (1986: 19)
notes:
If differences between two accents involve simply the incidence of a partic-
ular phoneme in a given lexical set, then that difference will be very highly
salient [...]. English English Speakers are highly aware of US /æ/ in dance
because they themselves have /æ/ in romance.Despite the perceptual saliency of phonological contrasts between the two
dialects discussed above that seems to be clearly supported, a third variety,