This chapter discusses some of the consequences of paying so much attention to the pursuit of interactional "naturalness" that the usability of the audio data suffers as a result. If there were a Murphy's Law of sociolinguistic interviews, it would be that researcher's most interesting interviews always seem to have the worst-quality recordings. Whether they take place in a particularly noisy room, or researchers forget to switch on a piece of researcher's equipment, or a battery runs out midway through the interview, any number of technological challenges can come between researcher and researcher's ability to collect and analyze researcher's data. Yet despite the sense of awkwardness, it is imperative for the success of researcher's data collection that researcher's be able to request a move to another location. Many of the issues that Hall-Lew Lauren confronted during her interviews were related to ambient noise. This type of noise can, potentially, be detected and evaluated by an experienced interviewer.

The Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS) is well advanced in southeastern Lower Michigan and largely absent in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In a previous study, Plichta and Rakerd found evidence that listeners from Lower Michigan make a perceptual adjustment for NCVS /a/-fronting when given acoustical information about a talker's dialect (a sentence-long speech sample), but listeners from the Upper Peninsula do not. The present study further examines this phenomenon. Here, individual differences regarding listeners' vowel categorization judgments indicate that the /a/-fronting perceptual response is consistently present among young adult residents of Lower Michigan, but much more variable among young adults from the Upper Peninsula. There is also evidence that the perceptual effect for Lower Michigan listeners is robust over a number of different stimulus variations. A word-level difference found here suggests that perceptual cues to /a/-fronting may be provided by both static and dynamic vowel formant features. Finally, listeners' decision reaction times provide new evidence of regional differences in sensitivity to NCVS.

What is the role of specific items in carrier phrases in promoting or demoting an advantage in understanding words that contain advanced tokens of change-in-progress sounds? Labov and Ash (1997) and Plichta (2004) note such an advantage for local speakers, but they do not provide evidence about individual features. In Labov and Ash (1997), carrier phrases contain other tokens of Northern Cities Shift (NCS) and Southern Yowel Shift (SYS) vowels. For the NCS test, had and sandals occur along with the test item socks; for the SVS test, I and knew occur along with the test item guy. In the NCS test, therefore, another vowel of the shift occurs (re), but not the same vowel as that of the test word socks. In the SVS test, however, I occurs, the same vowel as in the test item (guy). Additionally, the potential misunderstanding is a real word in the NCS test (socks) but not in the SVS test (gah). Finally, the NCS test gives a semantic/pragmatic clue to the identity of the word; the SVS test does not.

Compilers of corpora that document regional and social languages and varieties of languages have different needs and goals, and yet we also face common problems, and we should have an interest in collaboration. In this paper, we set forth our intention to begin such a collaboration. We begin by exploring the parameters of our various corpora. We then explore issues of access and analysis, whether public or private, whether for general audiences or for specialists. Finally, we assert that it is indeed possible, practical, and desirable for us to apply common methods to our common problems, and we propose specific recommendations.

There is no doubt that /ay/ monophthongization is one of the principal caricatures of US speech. Few studies, however, have made use of phonetic detail in investigating regional or group identification and caricature, and none has addressed the possibility that a perceptual continuum parallels the continuous nature of some phonetic variables. This study attempts to determine if the degree of /ay/ monophthongization is relevant to perception along a north-south line of nine voices stretching from Saginaw, Michigan to Dothan, Alabama, the same used in an earlier study of dialect recognition by the second author. Some characteristics of both the speaker (sex) and hearer (sex, region) are also explored.