Regional dialect perception across the lifespan: Identification and discrimination.

Although adult listeners can often identify a talker's region of origin based on his or her speech, young children typically fail in dialect perception tasks, and little is known about the development of regional dialect representations from childhood into adulthood. This study explored listeners' understanding of the indexical importance of American English regional dialects across the lifespan. Listeners between 4 and 79 years old in the Midwestern United States heard talkers from the Midland, Northern, Southern, and New England regions in two regional dialect perception tasks: identification and discrimination. The results showed that listeners as young as 4-5 years old understand the identity-marking significance of some regional dialects, although adult-like performance was not achieved until adolescence. Further, the findings suggest that regional dialect perception is simultaneously impacted by the specific dialects involved and the cognitive difficulty of the task.