Sociophonetics Lab - Past Recruitments
Past calls for participants
Past calls for participants
Name that Accent12/2/2023 Are you an Oklahoman who can tell where people are from based on their accents? Prove it with this 30-minute online survey! In 2019, we wondered how Oklahomans perceive and label Oklahoman accents. Well, actually, Dr. Freeman wondered what people mean when they say Oklahoma has a "country" accent. How is that different from Southern? Can people tell the difference? In part 1 of the the Oklahoma English project, "Accent Copy Cat," senior Jenna Curran recorded Oklahomans reading a short story naturally and then in several other accents, including "Southern" and "country." Vowel pronunciations are the most common way linguists distinguish regional accents, but our imitators' vowels didn't differ much between their natural, Southern, and Country readings. But maybe Oklahomans cue in to something else -- could listeners tell them apart? In this experiment, when Oklahoman listeners heard the natural readings, they said the speakers sounded educated and somewhat Midwestern; but they thought the speakers reading the story in Southern or "country" accents sounded Southern, "country," and somewhat "hick/redneck," but both accents were "somewhat" Oklahoman. They had the same reactions to the Southern and Country imitations, regardless of which one the imitator intended (which makes sense if the imitations were truly similar, like we thought). But they rated the natural readings differently (and more positively), even though the vowel pronunciations were similar, too. We'll have to look at things other than vowel pronunciations to find out what they cue into, but for now, we can say that the mix of Midwestern and Southern dialect features in Oklahoma might make both Midwestern and Southern accents sound equally "Oklahoman," and the Country accent might be Southern by another name. Presentations
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