Abstract
Research on dialect discrimination has shown that: (1) segmental differences, (2) differences in intonation and (3) differences in rhythm can be acoustic cues for discrimination. However, it is not known whether any of these cues is more important than the others. By investigating the two English varieties and manipulating different acoustic cues, the aim of this study is to evaluate which phonetic cues speakers of educated Indian English (IndE) and British English (BrE) use when distinguishing these two dialects. The results obtained showed that, among the cues involved in distinguishing Indian and British accents, listeners rely first of all on differences in the realization of segments, followed by intonation and speech rhythm, with all three factors contributing to significant effects.
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Notes
- 1.
In the following, only studies involving varieties of English will be referred to. For similar work on other languages, see for example, Boula de Mareüil and Vieru-Dimulescu (2006).
- 2.
A reviewer points out that such a pitch contour is unlike the intonation of BrE or IndE. This choice is intentional because the aim of this type of resynthesis was to remove intonation as an acoustic cue for dialect discrimination. Previous research (such as Ramus and Mehler 1999) used a completely flat contour. However, this differs from most human languages, which often have a declining pitch contour in declarative sentences. Hence, in the present experiment a flat declining pitch contour was used to suppress intonation as a source of information for dialect discrimination.
- 3.
In the following, results of the linear model based on the interval scale rating are reported. Deriving an interval scale from categorical judgements is sometimes considered problematic. For a systematic analysis of the data, it appeared useful to refer to how confident raters felt in their judgements (e.g. shift away from ‘Indian’ to ‘somewhat Indian’), information that would be lost when collapsing judgements to a two level categorical ‘Indian’ vs. ‘British’. For post-hoc tests, the latter approach was used to make sure that significance testing is based on the initial categorical scale. In the end, for the data at hand there were only small differences between a linear model and t-tests were used on interval data compared to a logistic regression and chi-square tests on categorical data. A comparison showed that these methodological choices did not influence the overall interpretation of the data, although small differences remained (such as interactions between factors with smaller coefficients).
- 4.
One reviewer raised concerns regarding the forced choice paradigm used in this experiment that one cannot conclude that a higher proportion of INDIAN reponses with flat Intonation suggests that this was actually perceived as more characteristic of IndE. Instead, British raters might have judged stimuli that they did not perceive as BRITISH simply as INDIAN, and Indian raters might have judged stimuli they did not perceive as INDIAN simply as BRITISH. However, if this were true, there would have been an interaction between intonation and listener group in the regression analysis, showing that flat intonation was judged differently by the two groups. In reality, the opposite turned out to be the case. Flat intonation was judged to be more INDIAN by Indian raters than by British raters.
- 5.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank all speakers and participants for taking part in the study, Marije van Hattum, Tiasa Almendra and Chandrasekar Kandharaja for help with conducting the listening experiments, and Olga Maxwell, Ulrike Gut, Adrian Leeman, the reviewers and the editors for comments on an earlier version of this article.
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R code for linear regression analysis:
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Fuchs, R. (2015). You’re Not from Around Here, Are You?. In: Delais-Roussarie, E., Avanzi, M., Herment, S. (eds) Prosody and Language in Contact. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45168-7_7
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