Jan 12 ====== Clopper/Pisoni:2005 ------------------- I would like to see a more detailed definition of "linguistic insecurity" I would also be interested to know if and how dialect identification differs among speakers from countries with a large number of dialects and/or without a standardized form of spoken language (e.g., Norway). What are /hVd/ syllables? Are h and d the IPA phonemes, and V any vowel? I found it very interesting and insightful listeners only attended to some of the available cues in speech signals to identify/locate a dialect (p. 324). But I don't really understand what kind of analysis is used to figure out which cues are attended to. For dialect mapping tasks for the German language, which dialect regions would we initially define? North, south, and maybe central? I would also be curious to see what would come out in the free clustering task. Is there a possibility to listen to examples of synthesized dialect speech? Is there research on this in Germany as well? In what areas could a speech interface be useful that can speak dialect? My guess would be that in most cases, understanding a dialect would be more important for NLP applications than generating it. Question: Since telephones bandwidth is restricted, is a telephone survey a suitable method for an acoustic analysis of the vowels as Labov,Ash, and Boberg did? Comment: I think it is questionable that older people may always perform better in dialect categorization than college-aged listeners. Depending on the job and working environment one may come into contact with more or less linguistic variation. Even as a college student you may meet people from diverse regions, thus more linguistic variation compared to older people who stay in the same environment and meet the same people. The authors state that many people who are asked to determine which region of the US a specific talker comes from rather perform a classification into "North" and "South" instead of distinguishing between smaller areas. Which phonetic characteristics make talkers sound like being from the "North" and which ones make them sound like being from the "South"? This paper and the related research somehow presuppose that understanding dialect recognition is important for perception. However, the experiments have demonstrated rather poor performance in this task and/or participants only distinguishing into broad categories. Maybe distinguishing dialects just isn't that important to human listeners? Of course, the suggested experiments in Section 13.4.1 may (have) shed more light on this issue. I think, it would be interesting to consider the rating of dialect markers across different groups of speakers, which were also mentioned in the discussion section(e.g. native speakers/non-native speakers, children/adults). Are they paying attention on the same sounds/words/grammar structures to detect a dialect? I'm confused about the "cross-over effect" in Figure 13.4 (13.3.1 Perceptual learning of dialect variation) and why performed the three-talker group better in the final generalization phase, I find that both group seem to have lower values. Can we measure the "strength“ of a dialect compared to a standard variation? To me, that would be an intuitive factor for how well I can understand a dialect. [Clopper/Pisoni:2005] We talked about accent stigmatization before. It would be interesting to see what the differences are between accents from a foreign language and dialects with respect to intelligibility and social judgments. Maybe these judgments also develop in a more negative or positive direction over time? Sometimes realizations of vowels are connected to character traits: Conn (2005) [...] to argue that front realizations of /ay/are associated with toughness in Philadelphia (Hay/Drager:2007) How is the diphtong realization perceived among Hood German Listeners and Berlin German Listeners? Comment: In section 13.4.1 Methodological extensions they mention changing the response format to broader of categories for the listener and mention that listeners do not quite have the same cognitive map like a linguist does. Anecdotally, I know many people who can recognize when you are not from their accent group but have a very hard time figuring out from where it is from. It would also be interesting to test on people whose second language is English but is of a certain accent (for instance I know some Spanish and Portuguese people with "Southern" accents and some Germans with "Midwest" accents that are so convincing that it’s hard to believe they never even been to those areas). Page 317 at the bottom: How do they know that listeners are first drawing conclusions about race/ethnicity? The Niedzielski 1999 study was so interesting to me, that the Detroit speakers had a distorted perception of their own speech. The author states that maybe the Detroit speakers may have been trying to be helpful by selecting the most standard vowel, but if that were the case then wouldn't both groups of participants have selected the more standard vowel?