Identifying children’s dialect from isolated words

This report describes a pilot study investigating whether adult listeners are able to identify the dialect of child speakers from the recordings of isolated words. The recorded children are either speaking a Stockholm dialect or a Scanian dialect. Despite low agreement between the nine adult listeners, the results show that adult listeners can indeed identify dialect even in isolated short words, and that some features in the word make them more revealing of dialect than others. For example, dialect is identified correctly more often in bisyllabic words than in monosyllabic words, suggesting that intonation is a strong cue to dialect identification.