Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2015
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.