Chapter 8
Phonetic Detail, Linguistic Experience,
and the Classi¿ cation of Regional Language
Varieties in the United States
Cynthia G. Clopper, The Ohio State University
- Introduction
The perception of linguistic and social categories in spoken language has
been studied in cognitive psychology and speech science for over 50 years.
Researchers in these ¿ elds have examined how linguistic information is pro-
cessed perceptually and cognitively as well as the role of talker-speci¿ c and
social information in spoken language processing. While the primary goals
of speech scientists have not been to understand sociolinguistic variation or
the relationship between language and social interaction, the methods that
they have developed are a virtually untapped resource for sociophoneticians.
Experimental studies of speech perception provide quantitative, empirical
insights into the perception and representation of linguistic and sociolinguis-
tic variation without relying on the potentially unreliable impressions of lin-
guistically naïve participants.
Peterson and Barney (1952) were among the ¿ rst speech scientists to
explore the role of inter-talker variability in speech perception. They recorded
a large number of talkers (men, women, and children) producing hVd utter-
ances and then played the samples back to a group of listeners and asked them
to identify the vowels. Overall vowel identi¿ cation accuracy was quite good,
particularly for those vowels that are located in relatively uncrowded regions
of the vowel space (such as /i/ and /u/). However, vowels that were involved
in dialect shifts were more likely to be misidenti¿ ed, particularly in cases of
mergers (such as /ľ/ and /ɬ/). Peterson and Barney (1952) interpreted these
¿ ndings as the result of the interaction of the linguistic experiences of the
talkers and the listeners. They also conducted an acoustic analysis of the hVd
utterances, which con¿ rmed a high degree of variability between the talkers
in absolute formant frequency values within a given vowel category, but a con-
sistent pattern of relationships between the vowels across talkers. These early