The current study used a hand-drawn map task, a dialect difference rating task, and a dialect classification task to explore the relationship between participants’ ideologies about dialect differences and their classification of authentic talkers from six regional varieties in Enshi Prefecture, China. The talkers frequently mistaken for each other in the dialect classification task were those who came from counties that were perceived to have similar dialects in the hand-drawn map task and the dialect difference rating task. Participants showed a positive response bias for the Enshi dialect in classifying talkers, corresponding to the dialect difference ratings that Enshi was rated as least different. Thus participants’ classification of real talkers was largely consistent with their ideologies about differences among “imagined” dialects. Participants’ ideologies about dialect differences were shaped by their home county, and their classification performance was affected by their home county and the talker’s social background.

We recorded older male speakers and younger female speakers of 86 local dialectsof Dutch. Using these data, we analyze and visualize the influence of standardDutch on apparent time changes in these dialects. Focusing for the most part onvariation in the sound components, we test whether (I) dialect change is mainlythe result of convergence to standard Dutch, (II) sound changes in two dialectswhich make them converge to standard Dutch also make them more similar, and(III) sound changes in two dialects which make them diverge from standard Dutchalso make them less similar. We used three-dimensional (first hypothesis) andfive-dimensional Levenshtein distance implementations (second and thirdhypothesis). These implementations are a novel step in dialectometry and in thestudy of ongoing processes of language change and their consequences for thedialect landscape. The findings corroborate all three hypotheses.

In this paper, ideas from perceptual dialectology, linguistics of speech, andcognitive science are drawn upon to explain the perceptions ofothers’ speech. The perceptual map task, based onPreston’s “Draw-a-map methodology,” wascollected from 215 respondents in Poland and transformed into result maps. Thesecond step in the analysis of the perceptual maps was to collect all of thelabels that were assigned to the perceived speech varieties around the country.Those two facets of the data show how the idea of connecting speech with aspecific locality can be observed quantitatively. The results propose anexplanation of the distribution of speech perceptions in Poland. The shape ofthe perceptions is created through activating gestalt processes to arrive withan observational artifact. Those are based mostly on the concept of geographyfacilitated by shared cultural schemas. All of those steps lead to a creation ofmultidimensional perceptual regions.