In the past semester, I cannot even count how many times I have overheard my roommate reciting “HOW NOW BROWN COW” loudly, slowly and often repetitively in our apartment. Although I first attributed this new habit to her unique personality, I soon learned it was part of her “Voice and Articulation” homework to record herself speaking. We started talking about this regularly, and as a result I began paying more attention to my “regional” accent.
This new interest in accents and pronunciation led me straight to Rachel Marie Theodore’s dissertation, “Some characteristics of talker-specific phonetic detail,” a paper on the IRis database highlighting the specific sounds and details that make talkers differ. The dissertation includes an interesting experiment in which “two groups of listeners were differentially exposed to characteristic VOTs [voice-onset-time] for two talkers, one talker produced short VOTs and the other talker produced longer VOTs. Exposure was provided during training phases in which listeners heard both talkers produce one voiceless stop consonant, either /p/ or /k/, in the context of a word (e.g., pain or cane). In test phases, listeners were presented with a short-VOT and a long-VOT variant of the word presented during training as well as a novel word that began with a different voiceless stop than presented during training. In both cases, listeners were asked to select which of the two VOT variants was most representative of a given talker.”
If you find this interesting, be sure to check out the paper in full!