Perception of Regional Dialects

After reading the article, I found the way people perceive different accents very interesting. I hadn't realized that people perceived their own accents as proper or not and that that affected the way they judged other accents. Although, the piece confirmed my belief that geographic mobility makes you a better indicator of various accents and showed that naive listeners perceive accent somewhat differently. Or at least that is what I gathered from the article, although is was kind of confusing at times.
There are a ton of cool things one could do an experiment on to examine the perception of regional dialects. One of these potential experiments could be done to determine whether or not people thought there was a "correct" accent and how those answers compared to the participant's own regional accent. The participant would listen to a recording of all of the main regional dialects and be told to identify the "correct" accent. It would be interesting to see how often the "correct" accent and the participant's accent were the same. It would also be interesting to find people who really believed they spoke English incorrectly, but were raised here. It would bring up many sociolinguistic issues.
Another possible experiment could be comparing young children's accents and how the children perceive accents that are different from their own coming from other children. Presumably, there wouldn't have been enough time around the age of 5 or so to develop such deeply held stereotypes about language. The kids could listen to tape recordings of stigmatized and non-stigmatized regional accents and say which ones they thought were "bad" and "good" speakers of English. I wonder how that would correlate with adults doing a similar experiment. I would hypothesize that the adults will have developed certain ideas about what is good and bad English socially.
Finally, a third really cool perception experiment would have to do with how people adjust their accents in different contexts. This would relate to how people thought their accent would be perceived among a certain group of people and this would motivate them to either consciously or unconsciously change their accent based on the accent of the person they were talking to. I have seen this happen with a few people I know. When they are with their family or friends, they talk in their more colloquial manner characteristic of their region, like people from the South. But when they speak with people who are not southern, they fear judgment and slowly change their accent to accommodate to what is perceived to be proper English. This idea can also be seen the other way. If someone is around people who they perceive to speak and a stigmatized why, when speaking with them, some people may unconsciously reinforce their own accents to clearly stand apart from what they perceive as an incorrect accent.
Overall I realized that perception is such a large part of regional dialects and that perception may cause accents to change over time. I found these ideas very interesting and hopefully my final project be as interesting as I begin the process of performing the experiment.