The%20perception%20of%20dialect

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The perception of dialect

• Julia Fischer-Weppler
• HS Speaker Characteristics
• Venice International University
• 17.10.2007

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Perception of dialect Introduction

• Sources of variability are natural consequences
  of language variation
• Different forms of variability including the
  impact of regional dialect have to be included in
  speech perception research

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Perception of dialectIntroduction

• Dialect variation is perceived and encoded in
  everyday language situations
• The process of speech perception includes dealing
  with those variations

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Adank and McQueen (2007)Goals of the Study

• To determine how variability due to regional
  accents affects the processing of words spoken in
  isolation
• To determine if short-term exposure to an
  unfamiliar accent affects the speed of processing
  words spoken in that accent

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Adank and McQueen (2007)Experiment

• 30 participants, divided into two exposure
  groups familiar accent (Local Dutch) and
  unfamiliar accent (Dutch spoken in East Flanders)
• Stimuli for animacy decision tests 120 Dutch
  nouns spoken by two females of each accent
• Stimuli for exposure phase 50 declarative
  sentences from six female speakers of each accent

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Adank and McQueen (2007)Experiment

• Test 1 Listeners accomplished an animacy
  decision task for 30 words spoken from all four
  speakers
• The exposure phase lasted about 23 minutes
  participants performed a distracter task
• Test 2 Listeners repeated the animacy decision
  task

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Adank and McQueen (2007)Results

• Performance was similar for both groups
• Performance across tests was alike for both
  groups
• Short-term exposure did not affect the speed of
  word processing
• But for all participants speed of word
  comprehension was slower for words spoken in the
  unfamiliar accent

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Clopper and Pisoni (2006)Goals of the Study

• To evaluate the perceptual similarity structure
  of regional dialect variation in the USA
• To further explore how residential history
  affects dialect perception

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Clopper and Pisoni (2006) Hypotheses

1. Naïve listeners are predicted to produce a
   relatively small number of groups of talkers
2. Geographic mobility and location are expected to
   affect performance
3. Mobile listeners are presumed to have developed
   more perceptual dialect categories and are
   therefore expected to better distinguish
   different dialects and to create more groups of
   talkers

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Clopper and Pisoni (2006)Experiment 1

• 66 talkers from six dialect regions in the US
• One (different) sentence per talker containing
  dialect-specific vowel shifts
• 22 listeners with different residential histories
  
• Listeners should group talkers in as many groups
  with as many members in each group as they
  wanted no time limit was presented

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Clopper and Pisoni (2006)Experiment 1

• On average10 groups of talkers, with a range
  from 3-30 and a median of 7 and 9.36 talkers per
  group with a range from 1-34 and a median of 4.
• Three main perceptual clusters New England,
  South and Midwest/West
• Relevant dimensions for perceptual similarity
  linguistic markedness and geography

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Clopper and Pisoni (2006)Experiment 2

• 48 talkers, even number of males and females from
  six dialect regions in the US
• One novel sentence per speaker
• 87 Listeners, split up in 4 groups based on
  residential history (non-mobile Midland,
  non-mobile North, mobile Midland, mobile North)
• The task was the same as in Experiment 1

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Clopper and Pisoni (2006)Experiment 2

• On average8.48 groups of talkers, with a range
  from 3-23 and a median of 8 and 7.08 talkers per
  group with a range from 1-38 and a median of 4.
• Significantly more groups for mobile listeners
• No significant difference in the ability to
  correctly group the talkers by dialect
• Relevant dimensions for perceptual similarity
  markedness, gender, geography

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Adank et al. (2007)Goals of the Study

• Eliciting regional variation patterns in the
  vowel system of Standard Dutch spoken in the
  Netherlands and Flanders
• Improving the languages vowel system description
  by including regional varieties
• Providing an overview of the extent of regional
  variation of the Dutch vowel system

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Adank et al. (2007)Experiment

• 160 Dutch teachers (professional language users)
  from four different regions of each country
• Target vowels were produced in carrier sentences
• Measurements of duration and formant frequencies
  of F1 and F2 for the 4800 vowel tokens were
  analyzed

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Adank et al. (2007) Results

• Enough regional information was present in the
  steady-state formant frequency measurements of
  vowels produced by professional users of the
  standard language to correctly classify the
  majority of the speakers into the appropriate
  speech community

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Discussion and Conclusion

• Research on the relationship between regional,
  social and ethnic language variation is rapidly
  growing
• It shows that listeners are able to make
  judgments about residential background and social
  characteristics based on the speech signal