Lecture: Perceptual dialectology within Greater Manchester:

Recognition of urban language varieties in the boroughs of Stockport and Salford in relation to forensic applications.

This talk will discuss a recent study I did for my final year undergraduate project. The project investigated the effect of geographical proximity on the successful identification of accents and how the presence of particular phonological features influence the participants’ successful identification outcomes. The wider scope of this investigation looked into forensic applications of this perceptual dialectology study to determine how this can be used to potentially determine reliability of witness speaker identifications.

This study presents a small-scale investigation on recognition of urban language varieties within Greater Manchester. The study focuses on the two boroughs of Salford and Stockport exploring how geographical proximity and the presence of distinctive phonological features can impact recognition rates, specifically exploring how this data can be used in forensic applications when judging reliability of witness speaker identifications.

An online survey was used to explore how these variables impact recognition rates with listeners given 12 audio stimuli from three different boroughs, both Stockport and Salford and also stimuli from Trafford was used as a distractor. Each of the given stimuli included one of the four phonological features THOUGHT, HAPPY, GOOSE and START vowels and each vowel was present in one stimuli per borough.

The data in the present study revealed that geographical proximity had more of an impact on Salford respondents than on Stockport respondents and that the presence of certain phonological features particularly the START vowel can increase the likelihood of correct identification. The data also revealed the amount of interspeaker variation on correct identifications. This study clearly demonstrates at least some of the complexities faced when using lay persons as voice witnesses.

Info

Day: 2023-10-28
Start time: 10:00
Duration: 00:25
Room: Hofburg Raum 2
Track: Sociolinguistics
Language: en

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