Recognizing Vowel Variation Between Australian, South African, and S.E. England Dialects

The present study focuses on participants’ ability to discriminate between small differences in vowel pronunciation in an effort to determine which vowels are most easily recognized as “different” between three similar dialects: Australian, South African, and Southeastern British. The study also examines which demographic features of the participants appear to assist them in recognizing these vowel differences between dialects. These questions are answered by conducting an experiment requiring subjects to judge whether pairs of short sentences are being spoken by speakers of the same dialect or different dialects. Each sentence contains mainly words with a specific vowel that is the focus of that particular sentence. This allows for identification the greatest perceivable vowel variation among dialects. Several previous studies involving dialect recognition have involved dialect identification tasks where listeners identify the geographical location of the speaker (Clopper & Pisoni, 2004b; Nay & Baker 2005). The current study eliminates the element of geographic identification to solely test the ability of participants to distinguish between similar dialects. The results of this study indicate that native speakers of American English are able to distinguish between the three dialects used in this study. In the process of distinguishing among speakers of different dialects, certain vowels appear to be more consistently recognized as “different” across all three pairs than others (including TRAP (average percent of correct judgments: 75%), TRAP Nasal (82%) and PRICE (70%)). These figures indicate that the linguistic factor of vowel variation affects whether a participant recognizes speakers to be using different dialects. Additionally, participants make “same” and “different” judgments with differing degrees of certainty. Participants assigned each judgment a confidence score (on a scale from 1 to 4), which allowed for a more precise evaluation of the participants’ perception of the differences between each pair of speakers. As might be expected, high confidence ratings were assigned to the vowels most often accurately judged “different.” Finally, although vowel variation did affect participants’ recognition of different-dialect pairs, none of the demographic factors of participants that were examined in this study (residential history, L2 proficiency, and gender) were found to account for differences in participants’ performance.

Thesis Author: Nay, Lyndsey Jane

Year Completed: 2007

Committee Members: Dallin Oaks, Don William Chapman

Thesis Chair: Wendy Baker