Regional dialect perception by British and American listeners

Abstract

Speakers’ regions of origin, across and within countries, can substantially impact their native language pronunciation patterns. Previous work suggests that listeners are sensitive to these dialect differences within their home country (Clopper & Pisoni, 2004) and have at least broad representations of dialects outside of their home country (Bush, 1967). The current experiment expands on these findings by investigating dialect perception within and across multiple countries for listeners from two countries: United States and United Kingdom. Fifty-one talkers from the Speech Accent Archive (Weinberger, 2013) representing 6 U.S. regional dialects, 5 U.K. dialects, and 6 dialects from other English-speaking countries produced the same two sentences. Participants ranked these speech samples on their proximity to “Standard American English” or “Standard Southern British English” in two ladder tasks. American and British listeners’ ladder rankings for the American baseline were very highly correlated, with a clear split between North American and non-North American dialects. For the British baseline, American listeners again had a split between the North American and non-North American dialects, while the British listeners showed more gradation across the dialects. The results suggest that listener home dialect and dialect familiarity, possibly through media exposure, shape perceptual representation of regional dialects.