Free classification of regional dialects of American English

Abstract

Recent studies have found that naïve listeners perform poorly in forced-choice dialect categorization tasks. However, the listeners' error patterns in these tasks reveal systematic confusions between phonologically similar dialects. In the present study, a free classification procedure was used to measure the perceptual similarity structure of regional dialect variation in the United States. In two experiments, participants listened to a set of short English sentences produced by male talkers only (Experiment 1) and by male and female talkers (Experiment 2). The listeners were instructed to group the talkers by regional dialect into as many groups as they wanted with as many talkers in each group as they wished. Multidimensional scaling analyses of the data revealed three primary dimensions of perceptual similarity (linguistic markedness, geography, and gender). In addition, a comparison of the results obtained from the free classification task to previous results using the same stimulus materials in six-alternative forcedchoice categorization tasks revealed that response biases in the six-alternative task were reduced or eliminated in the free classification task. Thus, the results obtained with the free classification task in the current study provided further evidence that the underlying structure of perceptual dialect category representations reflects important linguistic and sociolinguistic factors.

Auditory free classification: Methods and analysis

“…Unlike the techniques used in the literature reviewed above, the methods and techniques described below do not require any specialized software or programming skills beyond what is typically available in speech research laboratories, and can therefore be applied to new research questions by both students and more senior researchers. To make the methods more concrete, they are described in the context of an example set of data that was obtained in an unpublished follow-up study to the experiments reported by Clopper and Pisoni (2007). The stimulus materials in the present example were identical to those used in Clopper and Pisoni's Experiment 2.…”

“…When the number of groups is not predetermined, a similar set of analyses on the number of groups produced (including mean, median, and range) can also be computed (see Clopper & Pisoni, 2007). The second set of analyses focused on the perceptual similarity of the talkers and included two types of models: clustering and multidimensional scaling (MDS).…”

“…The free classification paradigm is more flexible, however, and allows researchers to explore general classification strategies in high-dimensional spaces by specifying any particular number of groups, or by allowing the participants to choose the number of groups that they produce. McAdams, Vieillard, Houix, and Reynolds (2004) and Clopper and Pisoni (2007) took advantage of one aspect of the flexibility of the free classification paradigm to examine the perceptual classification of contemporary musical themes and regional dialects of American En glish, respectively. In both studies, participants were permitted to make as many groups of items as they wanted, with as many vowel in caught (Labov, 1998).…”

The sociolinguistics of variety identification and categorisation: free classification of varieties of spoken English amongst non-linguist listeners

“…However, the use of an unconstrained free classification task, where listeners' are able to provide their own labels, has a number of advantages over a forced-choice task. First, the constraints imposed by the researchers in a forced-choice task, by its very design, i.e., providing a limited selection of countries or speech varieties, restricts listeners from creating their own categorisations (Clopper & Pisoni, 2007b). The present study attempts to extend our understanding of non-linguists' perceptions of linguistic diversity through the investigation of how accurately and consistently UK-born, native English speaking university students can identify speaker place of origin of specific varieties of L1 English varieties spoken in the UK, as well as a range of L2 English forms spoken by overseas students at the university in question (see below).…”

Perception in a Variable but Structured World: The Case of Speech Perception

“…1 As with the previous two questions, there is some evidence that listeners can in fact make these sorts of socio-indexical inferences on the basis of speech alone (for a review, see Thomas, 2002). For instance, listeners can classify talker's regional dialect at above-chance accuracy based on a short except of their speech (a single sentence read from a standard set Clopper & Pisoni, 2006;Clopper & Pisoni, 2007). We include a talker's identity as a socio-indexical variable (in the sense of what individual person they are).…”