Perceptual Recognition Cues in Native English Accent Variation: "Listener Accent, Perceived Accent, and Comprehension"

There are many aspects of speech that can provide information about a particular speaker´s characteristics. Accent is a linguistic trait of speaker identity. It indicates the speaker´s language and social background. The goal of this study is to provide perceptual human recognition of English native accent variation for accent and dialect identification applications. To examine relationships of the listener´s accent background with perceived accent and comprehension of the speech, perceptual experiments are conducted with three types of listeners - US and British native English listeners, and nonnative English listeners. The tasks are accent detection and classification, and transcription of the speech. The results from the study show that listeners´ accent background significantly impacts accent perception. The results also indicate that listeners use perceptual cues differently based on the task. Our analysis also suggests that comprehensibility of the speech affects accuracy of accent detection and classification. These observations point to the complex nature of the cognitive process involved in accent perception, which is bidirectional (bottom-up and top-down processing) and multi-dimensional (speech perception, language comprehension, etc.). This suggests the importance of understanding accent variation from a cognitive perspective for further development of accent and dialect identification systems as well as speech processing algorithms in general