Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA.
Department of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2020 Jan;147(1):657. doi: 10.1121/10.0000551.
Listeners are able to classify talkers by regional dialect of their native language when provided with even short speech samples. However, the way in which American English listeners use segmental and prosodic information to make such decisions is largely unknown. This study used a free classification task to assess native American English listeners' ability to group together talkers from six major dialect regions of American English. Listeners residing in Ohio and Texas were provided with a sentence-long (experiment 1) or paragraph-long (experiment 2) speech sample produced by talkers from each of the six regions presented in one of three conditions: unmodified, monotonized (i.e., flattened F0), and low-pass filtered (i.e., spectral information above 400 Hz removed). In both experiments, listeners in the unmodified and monotonized conditions made more accurate groupings, reflecting their reliance on segmental properties for classifying regional variation. Accuracy was highest for Northern and Western talkers (experiment 1) and Mid-Atlantic talkers (experiment 2). Listeners with experience with multiple dialects as a result of geographic mobility did not show increased accuracy, suggesting a complex relationship between linguistic experience and the perception of available acoustic cues to socioindexical variation.
当提供极短的语音样本时，听者能够根据其母语的区域方言对说话者进行分类。然而，美国英语听者如何利用音段和韵律信息来做出此类决策在很大程度上是未知的。本研究使用自由分类任务来评估美国本土英语听者将来自美国英语六个主要方言区域的说话者分为一组的能力。在俄亥俄州和德克萨斯州的听者分别接受了来自六个区域的每位说话者的一句长（实验 1）或一段长（实验 2）的语音样本，这些样本在三种条件下呈现：未修改、单调化（即，F0 平坦化）和低通滤波（即，去除 400 Hz 以上的频谱信息）。在这两个实验中，未修改和单调化条件下的听者做出了更准确的分组，反映了他们依赖音段特征来对区域变化进行分类。北方和西方说话者（实验 1）和大西洋中部说话者（实验 2）的准确率最高。由于地理流动性而具有多种方言经验的听者并没有表现出更高的准确性，这表明语言经验与对社会索引变化的可用声学线索的感知之间存在复杂的关系。
