Acoustic cues and linguistic experience as factors in regional dialect classification

Listeners rely on a variety of acoustic cues when identifying regional dialects, including segmental, prosodic, and temporal features of speech. The purpose of this study was to examine how native speakers of American English (AE) classify AE talkers by regional dialect when segmental and prosodic features are manipulated in the stimuli they hear; it also considered experience with different regional dialects as an additional factor affecting classification. Native AE listeners residing in Ohio and Texas completed a free classification task in which they heard the same sentence read by 60 monolingual AE talkers and grouped talkers together based on perceived regional similarities. Three versions of the stimuli were presented in a between-subjects design: unaltered, monotonized (f0 flattened to remove intonation cues), or low-pass filtered (to remove segmental cues). Preliminary analyses indicate that performance in the unaltered and monotone conditions was more accurate overall than in the low-pass filter...