Cross-dialect and cross-language differences in perception of vowels: A multidimensional scaling study

Abstract

This study examines the perceptual responses to vowels in two regional varieties of American English typical of Central Ohio (OH) and Western North Carolina (NC). Listeners are monolingual local speakers of each dialect and Mandarin-English bilinguals in Columbus OH. The questions are (1) how English listeners perceive acoustic variations in vowel quality differences not found in their own dialect and (2) whether bilingual listeners are sensitive to such differences not found in their native language. In a multidimensional scaling study, we investigate whether listeners make these perceptual decisions on the basis of acoustic properties or categorical properties of these vowels. Each listener was presented with two sets of 13 vowels /i ɪ e ɛ æ u ʊ o ɔ ɑ ɔɪ aɪ aʊ/ in a /hVd/ syllable. One set was produced by an OH male speaker and the other by a NC male speaker. Listeners rated all possible vowel pairs from one set only on a nine-point similarity/dissimilarity scale (there were two subsets of listeners in each group). The resulting dissimilarity matrices were analyzed using INDSCAL. Results will be discussed in terms of differences in perceptual dimensions (vowel coordinates and subject weights) as a function of dialect and L2 background.