Thoughts on the Perception Experiment

At first I thought this was way too scientific and technical for me to be able to understand, but I quickly got the hang of it as I read through. I was surprised by the extent of statistical manipulation that the team did on the data, and I especially liked the tree they created for the perceptional similarity for the different groups. I thought it interesting that the Mobile and Non-mobile Midlanders did not have a drastic difference in how they perceived other dialects, and I thought that the experimenters might have tried to explain that more. Clearly, moving around had a large effect on Northerners as the Non-mobile ones perceived themselves closer to the Midland than to the Northeast, the opposite for all three other groups. It seems like that is always the case: without exposure to other dialects, you tend to think that your own is the standard, or "without an accent." Since it seems that the Midland is the widely accepted "standard" dialect, perhaps that is why the Non-mobile Northerners were associating themselves with it.

It also seemed significant that the trials were held at Indian University in Bloomington, IN, an area that is quite certainly in the Midland area. The experimenters mentioned that they picked Northerners who had not been in the area for more than two years in order to avoid the effects of localization in the dialect, but to me that still seems to be a very long time. Within two years I think an accent would have adapted at least somewhat to the local area, and, more importantly, hearing that dialect around you all the time you are more likely to associate others with it. Therefore, perhaps the Non-mobile Northerners, having only been exposed to the North and the Midland, drew a similarity between the two for that reason only.

I liked the idea of examining mobility because I believe that does have a large effect on the way you perceive dialects. My own project will be quite similar to this, so I will use some of the techniques (especially in terms of randomizing the stimuli) when I conduct my own trials. I think in the future experiments based on exposure to the media would be good lenses with which to test dialect perceptions. After all, people who have not moved around much but who do watch a lot of TV where they are exposed to hearing different dialects in characters might perform better on these tests.