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INTRODUCTION
Language conveys meaning through the content of words and sentences, and this kind of meaning has been a traditional object of study in the field of language acquisition. However, language also provides meaningful information beyond the content which indexes social properties of the speaker and the speech situation. For example, people from different geographical regions talk differently, even when they are speakers of the same language. These differences have been extensively studied by linguists and prominently include systematic differences in the phonological systems and differing conditioning environments for various phonological rules, such as final consonant deletion (e.g., Labov, 1972; Preston, 1993; Trudgill & Hannah, 2002; inter alia). Native-speaking adults can perceive a wide range of dialect differences and can accurately group speakers according to their dialect (e.g., Clopper & Pisoni, 2007; Clopper, Rohrbeck & Wagner, 2012). Moreover, they can also use that information to judge whether or not the speaker is from the local region (Clopper et al. , 2012), and identify which region of the country the speaker is from (Clopper & Pisoni, 2004), as well as provide social judgments about how friendly or intelligent they believe the speaker is (e.g., Clopper et al. , 2012; Giles, 1970; Luhman, 1990; see also Finegan & Rickford, 2004, and Long & Preston, 2002, for related work). Thus, for adults, a speaker's regional dialect is a rich source of information about that person. When children acquire a language, therefore, they must learn about indexical information, including how to recognize elements that signal it as well as how to interpret those signals in a meaningful way. The current studies examine five- and six-year-old children's perception of regional dialect: To what extent can these children perceive differences among dialects and have they begun to make meaningful social connections to specific dialects?
Dialect use in children's naturalistic production
Three main strands of research have investigated various aspects of children's dialect perception and production (see also Cristia, Seidl, Vaughn, Schmale, Bradlow & Floccia, 2012, for a review). The first strand consists of close analyses of children's naturalistic speech (see Labov, 2012, for a review). This literature has revealed that children's early speech reflects the regional dialect properties of their primary caregiver, with...