Some Acoustic Cues for Categorizing American English Regional Dialects: An Initial Report on Dialect Variation in Production and Perception1

Phonological differences between regional dialects of American English are well established in the sociolinguistics literature. The perception of these phonological differences by naïve listeners is much less well understood, however. Using an existing corpus of spoken sentences produced by talkers from a number of distinct regional dialects in the United States, an acoustic analysis was conducted in Experiment I to confirm that certain phonetic features differentiate the dialects. Results provided further evidence for predictable phonological differences between dialects. In Experiment II recordings of the sentences were played to naïve listeners who were asked to categorize each talker into one of six geographical dialect regions. Results suggested that listeners are able to reliably categorize talkers into three broad dialect clusters, but have more difficulty accurately categorizing talkers into six smaller regions. Correlations between the acoustic measures and both actual dialect affiliation of the talkers and dialect categorization of the talkers by the listeners revealed that the listeners in this study were, for the most part, able to reliably use acoustic-phonetic features of the dialects in categorizing the talkers. Taken together, the results of these experiments suggested that naïve listeners are sensitive to phonological differences between dialects and can use these differences to categorize talkers by dialect.