Distinguishing native and imitated American regional accents
Research on distinguishing of regional American accents from one another is much more common than research on differentiating natives or imitators of regional accents. The present experiment is designed to establish whether primarily Midwestern listeners at a university with a high population of students from the Midwest and Northeast can distinguish speakers as native speakers or imitators from three American regions. Listeners categorized speakers of Northern, Northeastern, and Southern accents as native or imitators. Results showed that listeners could differentiate native and performed Northern and Northeastern accents, but not Southern accents. These results provide evidence of the difficulty listeners may have determining nativeness of accented speakers from regions the listeners are unfamiliar with, reflecting similar findings to distinction of regional accents from one another. Results and implications are primarily discussed as they pertain to media data, but also have implications for forensic linguistic study.
