Clopper Cynthia G, Pisoni David B
Speech Research Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
J Phon. 2004 Jan 1;32(1):111-140. doi: 10.1016/s0095-4470(03)00009-3.
The perception of phonological differences between regional dialects of American English by naïve listeners has received little attention in the speech perception literature and is still a poorly understood problem. Two experiments were carried out using the TIMIT corpus of spoken sentences produced by talkers from a number of distinct dialect regions in the United States. In Experiment 1, acoustic analysis techniques identified several phonetic features that can be used to distinguish different dialects. In Experiment 2, recordings of the sentences were played back to naïve listeners who were asked to categorize talkers into one of six geographical dialect regions. Results showed that listeners are able to reliably categorize talkers using three broad dialect clusters (New England, South, North/West), but that they have more difficulty categorizing talkers into six smaller regions. Multiple regression analyses on the acoustic measures, the actual dialect affiliation of the talkers, and the categorization responses revealed that the listeners in this study made use of several reliable acoustic-phonetic properties of the dialects in categorizing the talkers. Taken together, the results of these two experiments confirm that naïve listeners have knowledge of phonological differences between dialects and can use this knowledge to categorize talkers by dialect.
美国英语的不同地区方言在语音上的差异，在语音感知文献中很少受到关注，至今仍是一个鲜为人知的问题。我们使用来自美国多个不同方言地区的说话者所产生的TIMIT口语句子语料库进行了两项实验。在实验1中，声学分析技术识别出了一些可用于区分不同方言的语音特征。在实验2中，将句子录音播放给非专业听众，要求他们将说话者归类到六个地理方言区域中的一个。结果表明，听众能够可靠地将说话者归类为三个大致的方言集群（新英格兰、南部、北部/西部），但将说话者归类到六个较小区域时则更困难。对声学测量、说话者的实际方言归属以及分类反应进行的多元回归分析表明，本研究中的听众在对说话者进行分类时利用了方言的几种可靠的声学语音特性｡综合来看，这两项实验的结果证实，非专业听众了解方言之间的语音差异，并可以利用这些知识对方言说话者进行分类。
