Some acoustic cues for categorizing American English regional dialects

Abstract

The perception of phonological differences between regional dialects of American English by naive listeners is poorly understood. Using the TIMIT corpus of spoken sentences produced by talkers from a number of distinct dialect regions in the United States, an acoustic analysis conducted in Experiment I confirmed that several phonetic features distinguish between the dialects. In Experiment II recordings of the sentences were played back to naive listeners who were asked to categorize each talker into one of six geographical dialect regions. Results suggested that listeners are able to reliably categorize talkers into three broad dialect clusters, but have more difficulty accurately categorizing talkers into six smaller regions. Correlations between the acoustic measures and both actual dialect affiliation of the talkers and dialect categorization of the talkers by the listeners revealed that the listeners in this study were sensitive to acoustic-phonetic features of the dialects in categorizing the talkers. Taken together, the results of these experiments suggest that naive listeners are aware of phonological differences between dialects and can use these differences to categorize talkers by dialect. Implications for the study of variation and variability in speech will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH.]