Accent discrimination

Friends of our blog,

Hi again! This week our focus will be in accent discrimination. Professor Sumner asked us to take a quiz at http://www.uiowa.edu/~c103112/profile.html and then to try to guess the speaker’s race/ethnicity based solely on a recording of their pronunciation of a given sentence. In other words, we have to guess their origin based on their accents.

I found this quiz particularly interesting because the experiment I’m thinking of for my final project relies on the same methodology (which is to have a listener answering questions about the speakers based solely on recordings of their accents. The purpose is a little bit different: to evaluate whether one who doesn’t speak a certain language is able to distinguish accents of this language). And I actually did pretty well in the quiz: out of 10 speakers, I guessed the origin of 7 of them correctly:

From the chart, it is noticeable that I had trouble with identifying the origin of Hispanic speakers. I’d say that this is mainly due to my expectation that Hispanic speakers would have a strong accent, and the ones in the quiz didn’t have it at all (at least, not strong for me). I know some Hispanic speakers whose accent is very typical, in the sense that it keeps most of the sounds of the Spanish language. On the other hand, I did pretty well at identifying Middle Eastern speakers, and I think that the reason for that is the fact that these speakers do have a strong typical accent. This is quite interesting because it reminds me that, when I was taking an English class back in Brazil earlier this year, we listened to a Middle Eastern speaker in an listening exercise and in fact it was not easy to understand what he was saying due to his accent. Specifically, I remember that his pronunciation of the words “replenishment” and “soul” was very curious. I’ve just noticed the very same thing with speakers 7 and 10 (to be quite honest, I cannot see a remarkable difference between the Indian and the Middle Eastern accent, but somehow I was able to guess each one correctly).

Best,
Nikolas