Prosodic and segmental cues to regional dialect variation in American English

Abstract

Historically, most research on regional variation in American English (AE) examined lexical and segmental sources of variability. Focusing on prosodic variation, we have demonstrated significant effects of regional dialect on overall articulation rate, distributions of pauses, pitch accents, phrasal-boundary tone combinations, and syllable-to-syllable vowel and consonant duration variability (Clopper & Smiljanic, 2015, 2011). In this talk, we examine whether native AE listeners utilize prosodic and segmental cues to classify AE talkers by region and whether listener familiarity with different dialects affects classification. Using free classification with unmodified, monotone (flattened F0), and low-pass filtered (removed segmental information) stimuli, listeners from Ohio and Texas grouped 60 talkers based on perceived regional similarities. Listeners were more accurate in classifying talkers with the unmodified and monotone stimuli than with the low-pass filtered stimuli. There were no differences between the two listener groups in accuracy. Multidimensional scaling analyses indicated that listeners used gender and region as salient dimensions in classifying talkers in the unmodified and monotone conditions, but not in the low-pass filtered condition. The results suggest that segmental cues facilitated classification whereas intonation and global temporal cues on their own did not. The relationship between acoustic-phonetic features and classification patterns will be discussed.