Sub-regional ‘other-accent’ effects on lay listeners’ speaker identification abilities

a voice line-up study with speakers and listeners from the North East of England

Authors

  • Almut Braun University of York
  • Carmen Llamas University of York
  • Dominic Watt University of York
  • Peter French University of York
  • Duncan Robertson University of York

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.37340

Keywords:

‘other accent’ effect, in-group bias, voice line-up, voice parade, North East England

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that listeners perform worse in speaker identification experiments when they are unfamiliar with the accents of the speakers. Such effects have been documented for listeners hearing unfamiliar foreign languages (language familiarity effect) and unfamiliar regional accents ('other-accent' effect). The present study investigates the 'other-accent' effect at a sub-regional level. Listeners from three different localities (Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough) within the same greater dialectal region (the North East of England) participated in one of three target-present voice line-ups using samples spoken by speakers from one of the three localities. Listeners who heard a voice line-up in their own local accent (ingroup listeners) missed the target speaker's voice significantly less often than listeners who heard a voice line-up comprised of speakers of one of the other two local accents (out-group listeners). The proportions of correct hits and false alarms were approximately similar across in-group and out-group listeners.

Author Biographies

  • Almut Braun, University of York

    Almut Braun is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the TUULS project at the University of York, UK. In November 2015, she completed her doctoral research entitled 'The speaker identification ability of blind and sighted listeners - an empirical investigation' (Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany). She holds an MA in German Philology, Phonetics and Linguistic Engineering. 

  • Carmen Llamas, University of York

    Carmen Llamas is Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of York, UK. She is Principal Investigator on 'The Use and Utility of Localised Speech Forms in Determining Identity: Forensic and Sociophonetic Perspectives' (TUULS) project. She is co-author (with Joan Beal and Lourdes Burbano-Elizondo) of Urban North-Eastern English: Tyneside to Teesside (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), and co-editor (with Dominic Watt) of both Language and Identities and Language, Borders and Identity (Edinburgh University Press 2010 and 2014). She is also co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics with Louise Mullany and Peter Stockwell (Routledge, 2007).

  • Dominic Watt, University of York

    Dominic Watt is Senior Lecturer in Forensic Speech Science at the University of York, UK. His research interests are in forensic phonetics, forensic and legal linguistics, multimodal speech perception, sociophonetics, dialectology, and language and identity studies. He is co-investigator on 'The Use and Utility of Localised Speech Forms in Determining Identity: Forensic and Sociophonetic Perspectives' (TUULS) project, and on the 'Accent Bias and Fair Access in Britain' project, with Erez Levon and Devyani Sharma (Queen Mary University of London).

  • Peter French, University of York

    Peter French is Professor of Forensic Speech Science in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, Visiting Professor of the same subject in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of Huddersfield, Company Chairman of J P French Associates Forensic Speech and Acoustics Laboratory and President of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics.

  • Duncan Robertson, University of York

    Duncan Robertson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of York. He completed his doctoral research at the University of Glasgow in 2015, investigating implicit and explicit associations towards different social accents, and currently works on the TUULS corpus of North East English.

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Published

2018-12-07

Issue

Vol. 25 No. 2 (2018)

Section

Articles

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© Equinox Publishing Ltd.

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How to Cite

Braun, A., Llamas, C., Watt, D., French, P., & Robertson, D. (2018). Sub-regional ‘other-accent’ effects on lay listeners’ speaker identification abilities: a voice line-up study with speakers and listeners from the North East of England. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 25(2), 231-255. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.37340