Classi¿ cation of Regional Language Varieties 211who had lived only in Indiana, suggesting that geographic mobility is also an
important factor in the perception of dialect variation.
Several possible explanations may account for why explicit categoriza-
tion of unfamiliar talkers by regional dialect is dif¿ cult for naïve listeners.
First, the acoustic characteristics of the different regional dialects may not
be salient enough for naïve listeners to use them to create accurate cognitive
categories for regional variation in the United States. However, it may also
be that the listeners can clearly differentiate talkers from different regions,
but that they have dif¿ culty assigning the correct category labels to those
groups either because the cognitive mappings between acoustic properties
and regional dialect labels do not match those proposed by sociolinguists (and
provided by the experimenter in these tasks) or because naïve listeners have a
different set of categories altogether.
The results of an analysis of the response biases of the listeners in one
of the forced-choice categorization tasks suggests that naïve listeners may
have a different acoustics-to-label mapping than sociolinguists. Clopper and
Pisoni (2006) reported an asymmetric response bias for midwestern listeners
for talkers from the northeastern United States. In particular, Mid-Atlantic
talkers were frequently miscategorized as New Englanders, but the New Eng-
land talkers were rarely miscategorized as Mid-Atlantic talkers. In addition,
Figure 8.1 Percent correct categorization performance in four six-alternative forced-
choice dialect categorization tasks: male talkers only (Clopper and Pisoni
2004), female talkers only (Clopper et al. 2005), and two sets of mixed
male and female talkers (Mixed A: Clopper et al. 2005; Mixed B: Clopper
and Pisoni 2006).