Effects of gender and regional dialect on prosodic patterns in American English

Abstract

While cross-dialect prosodic variation has been well established for many languages, most variationist research on regional dialects of American English has focused on the vowel system. The current study was designed to explore prosodic variation in read speech in two regional varieties of American English: Southern and Midland. Prosodic dialect variation was analyzed in two domains: speaking rate and the phonetic expression of pitch movements associated with accented and phrase-final syllables. The results revealed significant effects of regional dialect on the distributions of pauses, pitch accents, and phrasal–boundary tone combinations. Significant effects of talker gender were also observed on the distributions of pitch accents and phrasal–boundary tone combinations. The findings from this study demonstrate that regional and gender identity features are encoded in part through prosody, and provide further motivation for the close examination of prosodic patterns across regional and social varieties of American English.