Perceived imitation of regional dialects Free

This study examined the effect of regional dialect on perceived spontaneous phonetic imitation. Participants shadowed CVC target words produced by talkers from two American English dialect regions, the North and the Midland. Imitation was measured acoustically in terms of vowel quality, vowel duration, midpoint f0, f0 trajectory, and onset and coda consonant duration. The productions and targets from the shadowing task were then used as stimulus materials in an AXB discrimination task to measure perceived imitation. Listeners selected whether the shadowed production of each word was more similar to the target (X) than a baseline recording of that same word. The AXB experiment included three conditions to distinguish between imitation of talker-specific and dialect-specific properties, in which X was the original target from the shadowing experiment, X was produced by another talker from the same region, or X was produced by a talker from the other region, respectively. The results suggest that listeners used dialect-specific properties in addition to talker-specific properties when judging imitation. Among the acoustic measures, perceived imitation was correlated with vowel and coda duration.