A new approach to acoustic analysis of two British regional accents—Birmingham and Liverpool accents

Abstract

Accent is a reflection of an individual speaker's regional affiliation and is shaped by the speaker's community background. This study investigated the acoustic characteristics of two British regional accents--the Birmingham and Liverpool accents--and their correlations from a different approach. In contrast to previous accent-related research, where the databases are formed from large groups of single-accent speakers, this study uses data from an individual who can speak in two accents, thus removing the effects of inter-speaker variability and facilitating efficient identification and analysis of the accent acoustic features. Acoustic features such as formant frequencies, pitch slope, intensity and phone duration have been used to investigate the prominent features of each accent. The acoustic analysis was based on nine monophthongal vowels and three diphthongal vowels. In addition, an analysis of variance of formant frequencies along the time dimension was performed to study the perceived effects of vocal tract shape changes as the speaker switches between the two accents. The results of the analysis indicate that the formant frequencies, pitch slope, the intensity and the phone duration all vary between the two accents. Classification testing using linear discriminant analysis showed that intensity had the strongest effect on differentiating between the two accents followed by F3, vowel duration, F2 and pitch slope.