Chris Montgomery

Perceptual dialectology has always placed listeners at the centre of enquiry, developing methods that elicit perceptions of linguistic difference from the bottom up. Traditional methods such as draw-a-map tasks (Preston 1989) or variety ratings (e.g. Coupland & Bishop 2007; Sharma, Levon & Ye 2022) have revealed how non-linguists conceptualise dialect space, but can provide only limited access to the linguistic detail that underpins perception (Montgomery & Moore 2018). This talk presents Salient Language in Context (SLIC), a new method that extends the bottom-up tradition by capturing perception in real time (Montgomery, Walker & Woods 2025). With SLIC, listeners click while hearing speech samples to indicate moments of perceived difference, then reflect on the linguistic features that motivated their responses. This approach produces fine-grained data on which aspects of speech attract attention, and how this varies across listeners and contexts. I will share results from recent studies using SLIC to investigate perceptions of regional Englishes, highlighting how the method reveals perceptual hierarchies, feature salience, and the role of social knowledge in shaping listener responses. The talk argues that SLIC strengthens the perceptual dialectology toolkit by linking qualitative listener strategies with quantitative analysis, offering new insights into how people hear and interpret dialect variation.