Dialect perception

Dear friends,

Hi! The theme of this week is to talk about potential experiments examining the perception of regional dialects, which is really nice, since my final project happens to be focused on perception issues.

Just to let you guys more aware of what I’m intending to do, here it is a basic description of my project (the first paragraph of my final project proposal):

“The purpose of my project is to investigate whether proficiency in a given language is essential for one to identify the different accents in this language. As we can notice by analyzing sound waves through Praat Software, speakers with different accents produce sound waves with different features that are related to such accents. My question is: are such differences so noticeable that these distinct sound waves are perceived as distinct sounds regardless of the listener or, instead, such differences are not so evident and as such rely on the knowledge of the language to be noticed?”

I can already tell some interesting facts related to dialect perception (and maybe to accent discrimination too) that happened during the first steps of my project. In order to answer the question that I proposed in my final project, I recorded five English female speakers reading a sentence for me. What was interesting is that, after I asked the girls to record a sentence for my Linguistics project, they replied with “But I don’t have an accent, is that OK?” or something alike. And it happened more than once! My guess is that, as we discussed in class, college students are generally worried about being discriminated for their origin. Not surprising, these two girls who claimed not to have a strong accent are not Californians. Still not surprising, some Californians told me that they do have an accent (and they actually went further, saying that they have a funny accent. Maybe this is why they say they don’t have an accent – they want to avoid this kind of assertion).

I found the results of the journal article we had to read this week interesting especially because they are applicable to the Brazilian accent-related reality. Look at the following Brazilian map that highlights the five different geographical regions of the country:


Source: http://www.bbportuguese.com/library/Map-brazil-state.bmp.

Notice the South of Brazil (the yellow region). I live in the state of Paraná (according to Wikipedia, pronounced [paɾaˈna]). For me, it is pretty clear that each state in the south of Brazil (Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul) has a different accent. The difference is evident for me. People from the Northeast (blue region) or even the Southeast (red region), though, do not see this difference so clearly. When I went to Rio de Janeiro, I was asked a couple of times if I am “gaúcho”, i.e., born in Rio Grande do Sul. A friend of mine from the state of Santa Catarina had a similar experience. On the other hand, I cannot say that I am able to identify the difference between the accents of Ceará and Bahia (which are two states of the Northeast region). As the research concludes, we tend to confuse accents that are not close to our reality.

Taking a step further, maybe this is why I am not entirely capable of identifying all the accents in English (even though some of them I do distinguish). Does it mean that my final project will lead me to conclude that people usually do not identify accents of a foreign language? Let’s wait for the results.