Previous research on speech perception has found an effect of ethnicity, such that the same audio clip may be rated more accented when presented with an Asian face (Rubin, Donald L. 1992. Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education 33(4). 511–531. doi: 10.1007/bf00973770). However, most previous work has concentrated on Asian non-native English speakers, and Caucasian speakers remain under-explored. In this study, listeners carried out an accentedness rating task using stimuli from first language Korean, German, and English speakers in 3 conditions: audio only, video only, and audiovisual. Korean speakers received similar accentedness ratings regardless of condition, but German speakers were rated significantly less accented in the video condition and more accented in the audiovisual condition than the audio one. This result is explained as an expectation mismatch effect, whereby, when the listeners saw a Caucasian speaker they did not expect to hear a foreign accent, but if they actually heard one it was made more salient by their expectation to the contrary.
Work in perceptual dialectology has argued that listeners’ successful identification of accent areas is facilitated by their geographical proximity to a particular region. Montgomery (, ) argues that this proximity effect is mediated by a ‘cultural prominence’ effect, where localities of high cultural salience seem less distant. We explore these claims using an online survey in which listeners were asked to identify the regional origin of speakers of five accents from England's ‘linguistic north’ (Liverpool, Manchester, Crewe, Stoke‐on‐Trent and Macclesfield) from audio clips of four different sentences. We show that the proximity and cultural prominence effects are partially supported, and that the proximity effect is driven by listeners’ likely contact with/experience of the dialect in question. We also show that listeners react differently to different sentences in the same accent. While some sentences are identified correctly very often, others, even for culturally prominent locations with distinctive accents (i.e. Liverpool), are hardly ever correctly identified. We connect this to the geographical distribution of the linguistic features in the clips, and we argue that the presence, absence and range of individual linguistic features should be systematically considered in all perceptual dialectology work which uses audio stimuli.
When compared to native-speaker language ‘targets’, second language (L2) speakers are known to exhibit within-speaker variation in their L2 language performance according to the identity of their interlocutor (Beebe & Zuengler, 1983), the topic that is being discussed (Dolgova Jacobsen, 2008), or both (Rampton, 2011). However, previous studies have rarely applied the same methodology to different first language (L1) groups and have rarely used data from a range of speakers, so they have been unable to explore differences between speaker groups. This paper examines situational style-shifting in L2 speakers of New Zealand English in two groups of speakers, one with Korean as their L1 and the other with German as their L1. Participants were recorded in three different settings: discussing family, discussing work, and in an authentic service encounter. Male and female speakers showed similar patterns, and all were found to exhibit stylistic variation in their production of English vowels such that tokens were most nativelike in service encounters, followed by discussion of work and then family. This pattern was more robust for the Korean L1 speakers than for the German L1 speakers, which is explained by different social and linguistic histories of the two groups in New Zealand. This paper adds to our current understanding of sociolinguistic variation in L2 speakers by applying audience design (Bell, 1984) and identity construction (Eckert, 2000) accounts to L2 speakers’ production of vowels.
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