PNW Dialect?

My mom has been listening to English spoken by people in Connecticut (in person) and New York City (the broadcast media) for her entire English-speaking life (my parents moved here in 1965).  Now that she's in the Seattle area she claims that there is a local accent and, more notably, that our 2-year old son uses it.  I dug up an article I remembered on the existence of a Seattle dialect and the study it talks about is mainly about vowels.  My mom says that people here lengthen their final consonants (I think that's how she was trying to describe it) and that she's stopped noticing it after being here for a couple years.  Now, this may not be a Seattle thing but a West coast thing (after all, aren't we all just transplanted Californians?)... I'll have to start listening more closely to how people talk.  But most of the day at work I'm with these aforementioned transplanted Californians (and everyone else isn't a native English speaker) so instead I'll need to listen to our son's daycare teachers since that's where he must be picking up this "accent" if that's what it is.  For now I'm suspicious that what she's referring to is not really a Seattle area thing but a younger generation thing... that sort of lazy talking MTV-cool affectation that I sometimes use when I attempt to connect with teens (and I probably sound really stupid doing it).

Of course I know what accent he'll eventually end up with: an Internet one.