Dialect Perception Experiment

I was pleasantly surprised that this journal was very readable and user-friendly. Even a person with no background at all in linguistics would most likely understand almost all of it, with the exception of the IPA symbols. I found that to be important because linguistics research is not something you hear about on a day-to-day basis, so the fact that it was so readable would make it easier for people to become more familiar with that line of research.

I thought that the experiment was very well thought out. I felt like as I was reading, as soon as I thought of an objection to improve the experiment, it was addressed by the authors. For example, just as I was thinking that it would be important to know which other region the mobile people had lived in, those other regions were named.

Something that they did address to an extent but that I think would be important to do if one wanted to improve the experiment would be to narrow down the experiences of the mobile listeners. The age at which they lived in the other region is extremely important. If they lived there as toddlers versus as teenagers, it would have a huge impact on the way they themselves talk as well as perceive others. In addition, it is important to know how long they lived in that other region. Also, I personally feel like having lived in only one other state doesn't really make them completely mobile. I felt like even with two state's worth of experience wouldn't really make them more perceptive to all other dialects.

In addition, the West is much to broad of a category in my opinion. They made it a point that they differentiated between Mid-Atlantic and New England dialects in this experiment, and yet they have this huge, broad category of West. As a native Californian, I know that there are many different dialects in the West. In fact, my project is going to be centered around differences between Northern and Southern California. That's two different dialects within one state, while they try to wrap up that and many more states and call them all one dialectical category, which I really don't think works.

Finally, I'm sure that the speakers in the experiment all had very different voices which may have had an impact on the results. Gender, race, and age surely had an effect on the way the speakers were perceived, and I don't think those differences were taken into account. In my project, I'm going to be making sure the two speakers I use have similar voice pitches, which is something that could have been useful in this experiment. That way, they would know that the any differences the listeners perceived were based on the dialects and not on voice pitch or quality.