Perceiving Southernness: Vowel categories and acoustic cues in Southernness ratings

Southern U.S. speech has been the focus of much sociophonetic work. In terms of vowel patterns, Southern speech is often characterized by the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS, involving shifts in /e/, /ɛ/, and /aɪ/), back vowel fronting, and changes in glide dynamics. The SVS, in particular, is said to play a primary role in distinguishing the South as a unique dialect region. However, there have been few investigations of the role of various vowel quality differences in perceptions of Southern accent, particularly across the vowel space beyond /e/, /ɛ/, and /aɪ/, or that ask whether any aggregate speaker-level acoustic measures align with listeners' perceptions, despite some suggestions in the literature to this effect. The current study examines what acoustic cues contribute to non-Southern listeners' evaluations of words spoken by Southerners as sounding more or less Southern accented, looking at a range of vowels from across the vowel space. Results indicate that listeners rate the speakers' productions of /u/ and /ɔ/ as most Southern and that vowel dynamics and speaker-level measures were the acoustic factors most predictive of Southernness ratings. These results together call for further work examining vowel dynamics and a more complete set of vowel categories in perception studies of Southern speech.