Abstract The present paper investigates to what extent subjects base their judgments of linguistic distances on actual dialect data presented in a listening experiment and to what extent they make use of previous knowledge of the dialects when making their judgments. The point of departure for our investigation were distances between 15 Norwegian dialects as perceived by Norwegian listeners. We correlated these perceptual distances with objective phonetic distances measured on the basis of the transcriptions of the recordings used in the perception experiment. In addition, we correlated the perceptual distances with objective distances based on other datasets. On the basis of the correlation results and multiple regression analyses we conclude that the listeners did not base their judgments solely on information that they heard during the experiments but also on their general knowledge of the dialects. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that the effect is stronger for the group of listeners who recognised the dialects than for listeners who did not recognise the dialects on the tape.

INTRODUCTION

To what extent do subjects base their judgment of linguistic distances between dialects on what they really hear, i.e. on the linguistic phenomena available in the speech signal, and to what degree do they generalise from the knowledge that they have from previous confrontations with the dialects? This is the central question of the investigation described in this paper. The answer to this question is important to scholars who want to understand how dialect speakers perceive dialect pronunciation differences and may give more insight in the mechanisms behind the way in which linguistic variation is experienced.