Revealing perceptual structure through input variation: cross-accent categorization of vowels in five accents of English

Abstract

This paper characterizes the perceptual structure of vowel systems in five regional accents of English, from Australia (A), New Zealand (Z), London (L), Yorkshire (Y), and Newcastle upon Tyne (N), on the basis of “whole system” vowel categorization experiments. We established patterns of within-accent vowel confusions, and then explored cross-accent perception, assessing how listeners from one accent background categorize vowels from another. Our experimental task required mapping continuous phonetic dimensions to perceptual categories in the absence of phonotactic and lexical cues to vowel identity and socio-indexical information about the talker. Our results show that, without these sources of information, there is uncertainty in vowel categorization, even for native accent vowels, and that this degree of uncertainty increases for unfamiliar accents. The patterns of cross-accent perception largely reflect the accent-specific perceptual structure of the listener, as opposed to adaptations to the stimulus accents. This finding contrasts with the type of active talker adaptation found with tasks offering lexical information about vowel identity and indexical information about the talker.