he role of intonation in Austrian listeners’ perceptions of standard-dialect shiting An experimental approach Zhaleh Feizollahi & Barbara Soukup Georgetown University/Universität Wien In this paper we discuss an experiment designed to investigate to what extent Austrian listeners use intonational contour and other prosodic factors to perceptually categorize standard Austrian German and Middle Bavarian-Austrian dialect. We begin by outlining the theoretical background for our study and identifying the research gap we propose to address, both of which grow out of a ‘Speaker Design’ approach to sociolinguistic variation (Schilling-Estes 2002) that focuses on agentive (strategic) language use. We argue that such an approach should entail an interest in listener perceptions of language use, and propose that perception experiments can contribute valuable empirical data here. We present one such experiment, in which Austrian native speakers were asked to listen to and categorize audio samples from which the segmental information had been iltered, in order to tease out the role of intonational contours in perceptual discrimination. his experiment complements existing research on the perceptual basis of Austrian standard-dialect diferentiation, which we briely outline prior to a detailed description of our study. Based on quantitative analysis of our experimental data, we then show that there is little evidence for the notion that Austrians may correctly identify standard and dialect based on intonational contour; however, strength of break indices and possibly pitch span do seem to afect listeners’ responses. We conclude our paper with a summary of our experiment, its results, and its implications within the broader research context of strategic language use and its efect on listeners. . heoretical background: ‘Speaker Design’ Recent ‘Speaker Design’ (Schilling-Estes 2002) or ‘ hird Wave’ (Eckert 2005) approaches to the study of sociolinguistic variation focus on how speakers strate- gically deploy diferent linguistic varieties at their disposal to achieve communica- tive meta-messages and efects in interaction, such as the projection of personas or interpersonal relationships. Such approaches evolved from earlier variationist