Clopper Cynthia G, Pisoni David B
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
J Phon. 2007 Jul;35(3):421-438. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2006.06.001.
Recent studies have found that naïve listeners perform poorly in forced-choice dialect categorization tasks. However, the listeners' error patterns in these tasks reveal systematic confusions between phonologically similar dialects. In the present study, a free classification procedure was used to measure the perceptual similarity structure of regional dialect variation in the United States. In two experiments, participants listened to a set of short English sentences produced by male talkers only (Experiment 1) and by male and female talkers (Experiment 2). The listeners were instructed to group the talkers by regional dialect into as many groups as they wanted with as many talkers in each group as they wished. Multidimensional scaling analyses of the data revealed three primary dimensions of perceptual similarity (linguistic markedness, geography, and gender). In addition, a comparison of the results obtained from the free classification task to previous results using the same stimulus materials in six-alternative forced-choice categorization tasks revealed that response biases in the six-alternative task were reduced or eliminated in the free classification task. Thus, the results obtained with the free classification task in the current study provided further evidence that the underlying structure of perceptual dialect category representations reflects important linguistic and sociolinguistic factors.
最近的研究发现，在强制选择方言分类任务中，未接触过特定方言的听众表现不佳。然而，这些任务中听众的错误模式揭示了语音相似方言之间的系统性混淆。在本研究中，使用了一种自由分类程序来测量美国地区方言变异的感知相似性结构。在两个实验中，参与者听取了一组仅由男性说话者说出的简短英语句子（实验1）以及由男性和女性说话者说出的句子（实验2）。参与者被要求根据地区方言将说话者分组，想分成多少组都可以，每组中想包含多少说话者也都可以。对数据的多维尺度分析揭示了感知相似性的三个主要维度（语言标记性、地理位置和性别）。此外，将自由分类任务的结果与之前在六选强制选择分类任务中使用相同刺激材料获得的结果进行比较发现，在自由分类任务中，六选任务中的反应偏差减少或消除了。因此，本研究中自由分类任务获得的结果进一步证明，感知方言类别表征的潜在结构反映了重要的语言和社会语言因素。
