Prior work demonstrated that toddlers can learn words from a speaker with a foreign accent and generalize that learning to the native accent when the accented variation does not cross phoneme boundaries. The current study explores the situation in which a vowel in the foreign accent is produced such that it could be confused with a different…

This dissertation explores dialect diversification in the long-distance New World Plautdietsch speech community. Plautdietsch dialects are traditionally classified as belonging to one of two types: either Chortitza or Molotschna. The traditional dialect classification has recently come under scrutiny because speakers rarely use features exclusive…

Systematic differences among regional U.S. English speech are recognizable to native speakers to varying degrees. This has been demonstrated by researchers in perceptual dialectology who ask listeners to match a speaker to his or her dialect region. Machines have also been able to identify the regional origin of a speaker to some degree, although…

Native speakers of a language are often unable to consciously perceive, and have altered neural responses to, phonemic contrasts not present in their language. This study examined whether speakers of dialects of the same language with different phoneme inventories also show measurably different neural responses to contrasts not present in their…

Selected phonological, morphological, and syntactic evidence from two hours of tape recordings of conversations of a four-year-old Native American New Mexican was examined to determine its value in assessing the child's bidialectalism. (Author/SW)

This study compared the intelligibility of native and foreign-accented English speech presented in quiet and mixed with three different levels of background noise. Two native American English speakers and four native Mandarin Chinese speakers for whom English is a second language each read a list of 50 phonetically balanced sentences (Egan, 1948).…

This study sought to determine (1) what attitudes black children have at the primary level, fifth grade, and eighth grade regarding dialects sometimes different from their own, and (2) what cues children use in identifying the race or ethnic background of taped speakers. An audio tape was made of thirteen speakers retelling Aesop's Fables. The…

This article attempts to assess the validity of dividing Polish students of English into British and American groups. The tests of the various hypotheses regarding linguistic and non-linguistic results of such divisions are described. (AM)

A directory of collections of audio recordings of varieties of American English spoken in North America and including English-based creoles contains information about collections of any size, classified according to the primary state in the U.S. represented by the speakers in the sample and cross-referenced when more than one state is represented…

This book is a talking tour of American English. Short easy-to-read essays explicate the key features that make American speech so expressive and distinct. The tour begins in the South, home of the most easily recognized of American dialects, travels north the New England, then west to the Midwest, and on to the far west and Alaska and Hawaii. In…

The junior high and senior high school English teacher should not judge dialect speakers as inferior to speakers of standard English but should rather be concerned with teaching his students the power and use of dialects. At the same time, he should capitalize on the students' dialect skills to teach them standard English skills. Teaching…