Feature attention and accent recognition: human listeners' responses to five Northern English accents

Abstract

This study investigates how human listeners perceive and locate Northern English accents, with a focus on the linguistic features that attract attention during accent recognition. Although sociolinguistic research often centers on specific phonetic variables, it is unclear whether these align with the cues non-linguists naturally notice when identifying regional varieties. To address this, we used a real-time linguistic attention method to examine which features listeners attended to as they attempted to identify the origin of speakers from five Northern English cities: Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield. Crucially, listeners were not directed to focus on any particular features. Data from 98 participants revealed substantial variation in recognition accuracy. While Liverpool and Newcastle voices were frequently identified correctly, accents from Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield proved more difficult to place. Participants consistently attended to salient features such as the bath and strut vowels, along with more locally specific features like fricated /k/ in Liverpool and glottalized /t/ in Newcastle. Accents with multiple distinct cues were more reliably identified, suggesting that a cluster of reinforcing features enhances perceptual success. The findings show that listener attention is guided by both cognitive and social salience, and that listeners rely on a broader and more socially grounded set of features than those often prioritized in computational models of accent classification. By revealing which features listeners attend to spontaneously, this study contributes to understanding the cognitive processes underpinning regional accent perception and offers new insights into the interplay between linguistic variation, salience, and social indexing.