Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification

Abstract

The ability to discern the use of a nonstandard dialect is often enough information to also determine the speaker's ethnicity, and speakers may consequently suffer discrimination based on their speech. This article, detailing four experiments, shows that housing discrimination based solely on telephone conversations occurs, dialect identification is possible using the word hello, and phonetic correlates of dialect can be discovered. In one experiment, a series of telephone surveys was conducted; housing was requested from the same landlord during a short time period using standard and nonstandard dialects. The results demonstrate that landlords discriminate against prospective tenants on the basis of the sound of their voice during telephone conversations. Another experiment was conducted with untrained participants to confirm this ability; listeners identified the dialects significantly better than chance. Phonetic analysis reveals that phonetic variables potentially distinguish the dialects.

A Primer on Accent Discrimination in the Canadian Context

“…For example, on hearing a voice on the telephone, a landlord might deny accommodation to someone because the speaker is perceived to be of a particular race or from a particular place of origin. In fact research involving large numbers of untrained listeners hearing speech over the telephone has indicated that they can often guess the race or ethnicity of speakers after hearing them say only the word hello (Purnell, Idsardi, & Baugh, 1999). Unfortunately, the term linguistic profiling carries the unfortunate connotation of some sort of systematic, respectable, or even "scientific" evaluation of speakers, even though discrimination of this type is anything but precise or well informed.…”

Perceived Masculinity Predicts U.S. Supreme Court Outcomes

“…Perceived intelligence, for example, has been found to affect an individual's employability [28]. Landlords are found to discriminate against prospective tenants on the basis of the sound of their voice during telephone conversations [11]. Perceived task-ability, dominance, and sociability are found to show the strongest correlation with perceived influence in simulated juries [12].…”

“…For example, voice-based personality judgments are associated with mate selection [8], leader election [9,10], housing options [11], consumer choices, and jury decision [12]. Although researchers have demonstrated how vocal perception influences the communication process [13], it remains unclear whether such influences find resonances in a communicative setting like oral arguments at the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), where subtle biases have consequences for major policy outcomes.…”

Feature subset selection for improved native accent identification

“…For instance, Purnell (Purnell et al, 1999) showed that listeners could identify a dialect with only one word as information (closed choice, African American Vernacular English, Chicano English and Standard American English). Another study (Thomas, 2000) showed that a single segment in a certain context might be enough to distinguish between non-Hispanic whites from central Ohio and Mexican Americans from southern Texas.…”