Resilience of English vowel perception across regional accent variation

Abstract

In two categorization experiments using phonotactically legal nonce words, we tested Australian English listeners' perception of all vowels in their own accent as well as in four less familiar regional varieties of English which differ in how their vowel realizations diverge from Australian English: London, Yorkshire, Newcastle (UK), and New Zealand. Results of Experiment 1 indicated that amongst the vowel differences described in sociophonetic studies and attested in our stimulus materials, only a small subset caused greater perceptual difficulty for Australian listeners than for the corresponding Australian English vowels. We discuss this perceptual tolerance for vowel variation in terms of how perceptual assimilation of phonetic details into abstract vowel categories may contribute to recognizing words across variable pronunciations. Experiment 2 determined whether short-term multi-talker exposure would facilitate accent adaptation, particularly for those vowels that proved more difficult to categorize in Experiment 1. For each accent separately, participants listened to a pre-test passage in the nonce word accent but told by novel talkers before completing the same task as in Experiment 1. In contrast to previous studies showing rapid adaptation to talker-specific variation, our listeners' subsequent vowel assimilations were largely unaffected by exposure to other talkers' accent-specific variation.

Effects of Language Background on the Development of Sociolinguistic Awareness: The Perception of Accent Variation in Monolingual and Multilingual 5- to 7-Year-Old Children

“…However, the exact nature of these representations requires further exploration, and whilst our results highlight the need for an important role for social context, we would not want to exclude a role for a phonetic-phonological explanation. For example, one could imagine that If listeners' representations develop to be tolerant of variation, at least to some degree, then as well as facilitating perceptual adaptation by making it easier to map phonetic variation to underlying phonological (i.e., abstract) categories (Shaw et al, 2018), they might also facilitate mapping of variation across individual talkers to macrosociological constructs. In developmental terms, this might mean that as children shift from phonetic to phonological processing (Nathan et al, 1998), they may be better able to spot and extract patterns of variation, and map these to social categories based on their developing understanding of their social world.…”

Bilingual phonology in dichotic perception: A case study of Malayalam and English voicing

“…When properties of the phonetic signal do not map directly to features in the listener's attended phonology, they map instead to the nearest phonological category. This mechanism of perceptual assimilation to the nearest phonological category is wellestablished from research on cross-language speech perception (e.g., Best 1995;Faris et al 2016), L2 speech perception (Best & Tyler 2007;Bundgaard-Nielsen et al 2011), bilingual speech perception (Antoniou et al 2012;Antoniou et al 2013), and cross-accent speech perception (Best et al 2015;Best et al 2015;Shaw et al 2018). Here, we observed its effects in bilinguals during dichotic listening.…”

Listening to accented speech in Brazilian Portuguese: On the role of fricative voicing and vowel duration in the identification of /s/ – /z/ minimal pairs produced by speakers of L1 Spanish

“…In this paper, we extend Perozzo's proposal to account for cases of perception of L2 accented speech by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. We argue that the same premises of sound assimilation portrayed in L2 assimilation models can be used to account for the perception of L2-accented speech as well as for the speech perception/assimilation processes of other dialects of the same language, as previously proposed in studies by Shaw et al (2018).…”