Measures of Dialect Density
Another way to describe a speaker’s use of a particular dialect is to quantify the speaker’s use of salient linguistic patterns that are known to be produced by other speakers of that dialect. An index of a speaker’s rate of these dialect patterns is also referred to as a speaker’s Dialect Density Measure (DDM). In the literature, there are at least three ways to calculate DDM. These three ways are illustrated below. In Oetting & McDonald (2002) we showed that these three ways of calculating DDM are highly correlated (r > .90). In our lab, we often use the second method, because it leads to the greatest spread between our participants’ DDM scores. Nevertheless, with correlations of .90 or higher, all three methods lead to speaker ratings that are highly consistent with each other.
