The maintenance of regional dialects: a matter of gender? Boys, but not girls, use local varieties in relation to their friends' nativeness and local identity

The old, the new, and the in-between: Preadolescents' use of stylistic variation in speech in projecting their own identity in a culturally changing environment

Cultural learning begins early, with infants' and young children's initial imitations of group-specific local behaviors. Comparatively little is known about cultural development in older children, whose more advanced socio-cognitive skills can moderate their decisions about adherence to the established cultural conventions and acceptance of new norms. Focusing on the acquisition of a regional dialect, the current study was conducted in a small community in western North Carolina, whose rich Appalachian heritage grew from distinctive cultural and living traditions. The region has gradually opened up to outside influences and the local culture is now shifting toward mainstream American socio-cultural norms. The study sought to determine how preadolescents positioned themselves in this socio-culturally changing environment. Using detailed acoustic analysis to measure stylistic variation in speech in 9-12-year-olds and perceptual ratings to verify its salience, we examined the pronunciation of the vowel /ai/ to test children's adherence to the old Appalachian identity marker (the monophthong) and their acceptance of the modern American society (the diphthong). As an innovation, children created an intermediate phonetic variant that reduced the pronunciation differences between the old and modern patterns. Demonstrating the ability to adapt speech style to context, they increased the degree of diphthongization in this /ai/-variant in careful speech (reading), and reduced it in casual conversations. Girls' productions were more diphthongal than were boys' in reading but not in conversations. The new variant in children represents regional dialect levelling, and likely results from their accommodation to the changing environment, which promotes reduction of old marked forms.

Dyslexia Limits the Ability to Categorize Talker Dialect

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the underlying phonological impairment in dyslexia is associated with a deficit in categorizing regional dialects.

METHOD

Twenty adults with dyslexia, 20 school-age children with dyslexia, and 40 corresponding control listeners with average reading ability listened to sentences produced by multiple talkers (both sexes) representing two dialects: Midland dialect in Ohio (same as listeners' dialect) and Southern dialect in Western North Carolina. Participants' responses were analyzed using signal detection theory.

RESULTS

Listeners with dyslexia were less sensitive to talker dialect than listeners with average reading ability. Children were less sensitive to dialect than adults. Under stimulus uncertainty, listeners with average reading ability were biased toward Ohio dialect, whereas listeners with dyslexia were unbiased in their responses. Talker sex interacted with sensitivity and bias differently for listeners with dyslexia than for listeners with average reading ability. The correlations between dialect sensitivity and phonological memory scores were strongest for adults with dyslexia.

CONCLUSIONS

The results imply that the phonological deficit in dyslexia arises from impaired access to intact phonological representations rather than from poorly specified representations. It can be presumed that the impeded access to implicit long-term memory representations for indexical (dialect) information is due to less efficient operations in working memory, including deficiencies in utilizing talker normalization processes.