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Identifying a speaker's regional origin: the role of temporal information

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Publication date31/05/2016
Host publicationProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Speech Prosody (SP2016)
Pages1081-1085
Number of pages5
<mark>Original language</mark>English
EventSpeech Prosody 2016 - Boston, Mass., United States
Duration: 31/05/20163/06/2016
http://sites.bu.edu/speechprosody2016/

Conference

ConferenceSpeech Prosody 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston, Mass.
Period31/05/163/06/16
Internet address

Publication series

NameSpeech Prosody 2016
ISSN (Print)2333-2042

Conference

ConferenceSpeech Prosody 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston, Mass.
Period31/05/163/06/16
Internet address

Abstract

Previous studies have revealed that, depending on the language, listeners can identify speakers’ dialects quite well. The role of segments and prosody in this task is largely unknown, however. In a between-subjects design, we tested a total of 30 listeners in two conditions: in the unmorphed condition, listeners heard original sentences from two Swiss German dialects; in the duration morphed condition, listeners heard the same material, but with syllable durations exchanged between the two dialects. In a two-alternative forced choice design, subjects judged the regional origin of the stimuli heard. Results revealed near perfect identification performance for both conditions, thus underlining the overriding dominance of segmental cues in dialect identification tasks. The findings reported are pertinent to forensic phonetics, enhancing the diagnostic power of naïve and expert listeners’ claims about suspect speakers’ voices.