Controlling for dialect in contextless vowel identification: Revisiting the Peterson–Barney experiment.
Sharon Ash · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1992
In an early study on the spectrographic measurement of vowels, Peterson and Barney proposed that listeners would interpret a vowel heard in isolation as the phoneme in their own speech corresponding to that sound [G. E. Peterson and H. L. Barney, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 24, 175–184 (1952)]. The present study is based on their experiment and aims to test their hypothesis by controlling for the dialect of both speakers and listeners. In this investigation, listeners in Philadelphia, Birmingham, and Chicago were asked to recognize 14 vowel phonemes pronounced in the frame /k—d/ by speakers from the same three cities. It is found that for most firmly established variables, local listeners have an advantage in identifying phonemes pronounced by speakers of their own dialect. However, for new changes in progress and for at least one well-known stable variable, local listeners have great difficulty identifying the vowel, nearly as much as do listeners from other areas. Finally, both local and nonlocal listeners make a significant number of errors in identifying certain phonemes. The findings are explained in terms of chain shifts and the phonetics of the test tokens. [Work supported by NSF.]