282 Erik R. Thomas, Norman J. Lass, and Jeannine Carpenter
Another ¿ nding of these experiments is that different groups of listen-
ers have different repertoires of cues that they are capable of accessing. The
clearest example of such a difference is the result from Experiment B that
North Carolinians used both vowel quality and prosody as cues, while West
Virginians used prosody but not vowel quality. This conclusion should not
be surprising, considering that individuals have greatly varying experiences.
It provides a mechanism for the ¿ ndings of Alvarenga (1971), Haley (1990),
Hawkins (1992), and Foreman (2000), noted previously, that groups differ in
their levels of accuracy for ethnic identi¿ cation.
The ¿ ndings described here certainly do not exhaust what can be ascertained
about how listeners distinguish African Americans from European Americans.
Voice quality remains a potential source of cues that researchers have hardly
tapped. The earlier results for phonation are promising, and further experimen-
tation with phonation is planned. More speci¿ c information about what aspects
of prosody listeners utilize would also be desirable. African American English
is by far the most heavily investigated dialect (or group of dialects) of American
English, and its identi¿ cation by listeners is perhaps the most intensively stud-
ied perceptual issue in American sociolinguistics. Yet it is still not thoroughly
understood. Understanding ethnic identi¿ cation more completely would aid in
understanding how stereotyping occurs and combating its effects.
Acknowledgments
Research for this chapter was supported by NSF grant BCS-0213941. We wish to thank
Andrew G. B. Grimes for his help in preparing the Praat script used for Experiment B.
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