Mar 1, 2007:American English dialect perception experiment
Keelan Evanini, Department of LinguisticsI am going to replicate the experiment done by Clopper and Pisoni, 2004 ("Some acoustic cues for the perceptual categorization of American English regional dialects", JPhon). The experiment involves playing 3 sentences each from 66 speakers in the TIMIT corpus, and conducting a forced-choice categorization of their dialect (from among six dialect regions). The key difference is that Clopper and Pisoni did the experiment with naive subjects, whereas I am specifically using linguists as subjects. I want to see how much difference this makes in the results (this is relevant, because I want to see what is a reasonable upper bound on the accuracy that can be expected from the best automatic dialect identification system).