Identification of Regional Varieties by Intonational Cues

Two experiments examined the commonly held belief that regional varieties of German can be identified by intonational features alone. In both experiments, listeners were presented with regional intonational contours of German. In the first experiment, listeners judged contours of Hamburg urban vernacular compared with contours of Northern Standard German. In the second experiment, listeners judged contours of Berlin urban vernacular compared with contours of both Northern Standard German and Low Alemannic German. The performance of listeners was found to vary with their linguistic experience. Listeners who were familiar both with the local variety and with some nonlocal variety by personal contact performed better than listeners who were familiar with the local variety only. Moreover, also listeners not familiar with Hamburg German and Berlin German, respectively, were found to perform the identification test with some success. This led to the conclusion that overall success rates do not only depend on true recognition of local contours but may additionally be enhanced by using some kind of elimination strategy. A second factor that affected performance was the choice of speaker for generating the carrier utterances. In the first experiment, all carrier utterances were produced by a speaker of Northern Standard German. In the second experiment, two sets of carrier utterances were used. The first set was obtained from a speaker of Northern Standard German and the second set from a speaker of Berlin urban vernacular. As expected, Berlin contours were better identified when presented with an utterance that was produced by a speaker of Berlin urban vernacular. However, no uniform effect was found for the different contours that were examined.