The Role of Acoustic Distance and Sociolinguistic Knowledge in Dialect Identification

Abstract

Listeners are able to quite accurately distinguish between different dialects of their native language, but little is known about the process of dialect identification and the phonetic cues listeners use to identify someone’s regional origin. This study examines how different segments, acoustic between-dialect distance, and the listeners’ knowledge about a dialect contribute to this process. Native speakers of Grison and Zurich German were asked to categorise isolated words spoken by eight speakers of Grison and eight speakers of Zurich German. Stimuli contained either none, one, or two segmental cues to regional origin. The presence of one dialect-specific segment was enough to allow for an identification rate well above chance. Sensitivity measures and analysis of reaction time showed that the two dialect groups largely relied on the same segmental cues. Acoustic distance to the other dialect, quantified as Euclidean distance in the F1 × F2 vowel space, generally facilitated dialect identification, but interacted with native speakers’ knowledge about the dialects: in segments which listeners explicitly associated with one of the two dialects, acoustic distance facilitated dialect recognition to a larger extent than in segments in which listeners were not aware of dialectal variation. The results suggest that, depending on the listener’s prior knowledge about a dialect, acoustic variation is weighted differently. Further analysis showed that Zurich listeners were more sensitive to the dialect differences, responded faster, and presented a more marked own-dialect response bias than Grison listeners. These findings are in line with the status of Grison German as a marked dialect and Zurich German as a neutral dialect, and suggest that, depending on their own dialect’s status, listeners used different decision strategies.

Social factors in accent recognition: a large-scale study in perceptual dialectology

“…The presented GAM therefore successfully examined the effects of listener-related factors on listeners' accent-recognition errors. The results parallel the findings of prior studies investigating levels of categorization accuracy for speaker origin (e.g., Bent et al, 2016;Gnevsheva, 2018;McKenzie, 2019;Preston, 1999;Ruch, 2018;Watanabe, 2017). Although adult listeners were shown to be generally able to identify speakers' regional origins with reasonable accuracy, their accent-recognition patterns were imperfect.…”

“…These speakers might therefore be exposed to less linguistic variability, making them less familiar with other accents and thus poorer listeners. Ruch (2018), in contrast, raised the hypothesis that urban speakers are more in contact with different varieties on a daily basis than rural speakers and might therefore be more sensitive to variability. In order to test these hypotheses in future studies, it would make sense to include rurality versus urbanity as a listener factor, together with a measure of listeners' mobility profiles.…”

Vowel convergence does not affect auditory speaker discriminability in humans and machine in a case study on Swiss German dialects

“…Moreover, the nonnative listeners' mother tongues (i.e. Italian and Persian) have crucial differences in the vocalic and consonantal inventory as well in their rhythmic organization (Majidi and Ternes, 1999;Loporcaro and Bertinetto, 2005;Fleischer and Schmid, 2006;Leemann et al 2012;Ruch, 2018) which presumably made it hard to benefit from the first language to distinguish speaker-from dialect-specific features. Conversely, the group of Zurich German listeners had a clear advantage in voice discrimination since they could process the full set of linguistic information available in the stimuli, and thus be sensitive to subtle differences in segmental and prosodic information.…”

“…We selected ZHG listeners in this study for dialect familiarity reasons. Previous research on the role of sociolinguistic knowledge and language distance in dialect identification has shown that (1) ZHG listeners are more sensitive to dialectal differences and performed more accurately than GRG listeners, and that (2) Swiss German subjects have a shared knowledge about the dialect specific features of GRG and perceive ZHG as a more neutral dialect (Ruch, 2018). To ensure that listeners have comparable socio-linguistic background, after the speaker discrimination experiment, they filled out a questionnaire about their linguistic and dialectal background (e. g. contexts and frequency of exposure to/use of Zurich German), familiarity with Swiss German dialects and knowledge of second languages.…”

Intra-regional differences in the social perception of allophonic variation: The evaluation of [tʃ] and [ʃ] in Huelva and Lepe (Western Andalucía)

“…As there is ample evidence of dialect levelling of traditional Andalusian features in syllable-onset position in favor of supra-local features throughout Andalucía (Hernández Campoy & Villena Ponsoda, 2009;Moya Corral, 2018b;Villena Ponsoda & Vida Castro, 2020; inter alia), future studies should look to conduct perception studies of these variants in order to shed light into the social motivation for such dialect levelling of traditional features. Additionally, more studies should not only analyze specific communities, but compare specific communities within larger regions (Ruch, 2018a, Ruch, 2018b as well as nearby communities (Watson & Clark, 2013) in order to find more nuanced evaluations of linguistic variables that would be overlooked in larger regional labels such as Andalusians, Pennsylvanians, Texans, or Southerners. In conclusion, the current study has demonstrated that while the communities of Huelva and Lepe share similar language attitudes in evaluating the supra-local Castilian feature [tʃ] as more overtly prestigious than the traditional Andalusian feature [ʃ], there are nuanced differences in attitudes between the two communities due to their unique historical and socioeconomic developments.…”