Dialect proficiency and Mandarin rating in dialect identification: The case of Jiangsu province

Abstract This paper investigated origin identification in Jiangsu province, China. In total, ten localities were involved, including nine from Jiangsu province and the city of Beijing. Listeners were presented with recordings of forty speakers (four speakers from each locality) speaking local Mandarin and were asked to identify the region of origin of the speaker and score their Mandarin. Results revealed significant effects of speaker dialect and listener dialect in the identification of speaker origin. Firstly, listeners were able to make distinctions between speakers of Jiangsu province dialect and speakers of non-Jiangsu province dialect (Beijing speakers). Secondly, listeners from Jiangsu province were significantly better than non-Jiangsu listeners at correctly identifying the origin of speakers. In addition, we found significant effects of speaker gender, speaker dialect proficiency, listener dialect proficiency, and speaker Mandarin rating on the identification accuracy of speaker origin in individual analyses of dialect areas.