Do you hear what I hear? Experimental measurement of the perceptual salience of acoustically manipulated vowel variants by Southern speakers in Memphis, TNVa l e r i e F r i d l a n d a n d K a t h r y n B a r

This study replicates Dennis Preston's folk-dialectology research to determine how speakers from Memphis, Tennessee, view their speech and that of speakers from Northern and Western states on correctness and pleasantness dimensions and how regional and ethnic speech stereotypes affect their evaluations. Results suggest that Memphians consider each region significantly different from the others on language correctness scales and that Southern regions are less “correct” than other regions. However, no regions are rated significantly different for language pleasantness. Such a finding, which elevates regional pleasantness despite regional incorrectness, is not surprising given similar findings elsewhere but does contradict Memphians' behavior when listening to actual speech samples of Southern-shifted vowel tokens where they rate their own speech least educated and pleasant. Intra-Southern differences in ratings on these folk-dialectology tasks, those that appear to demark rural-versus-urban association, are explored as potentially underlying this contrast in behavior. In addition, while they show productively similar vowel systems in Memphis, differences in dialect perceptions between Southern African American and white raters are explored. Finally, to see how Western dialect experience affects participants' pleasantness and correctness ratings, the article also examines how state ratings differed for speakers from Reno, Nevada, compared to Memphians.

An earlier study (Fridland, Bartlett, and Kreuz 2004) showed that listeners in Memphis, Tennessee, judged more perceptually salient those vowel shifts that the local dialect used as opposed to vowel shifts that Memphis had in common with other U.S. dialects. This study examines the perceptions of 209 natives of Memphis in two tasks: recognizing vowel shifts as Southern and rating a range of synthesized variants of ey, E, uw, and ow for level of education and sounding pleasant. In the first part, participants were successful in recognizing vowel variants as Southern. In the second, they discerned slight phonetic shifts and assigned lower ratings for education and pleasantness to those vowel variants that they recognized as most Southern. The results add support to the evidence that perceptual judgments of speech depend on both linguistic and social information.