Identifying Challenges for Listeners of Belfast English: A Qualitative Investigation into Transcription Errors

A prior experimental study revealed that the Belfast accent was significantly more difficult to understand than the Dublin accent, even among listeners with similarly limited exposure to both varieties. The aim of the current study is to investigate the phonetic causes of the Belfast accent’s lowered intelligibility for listeners from the United States, Belgium, and the Republic of Ireland. The words that were incorrectly transcribed by at least 50% of listeners were selected and the erroneous transcriptions were assessed for likely causes of confusion. Acoustic analyses were conducted to investigate whether listeners’ misperceptions could be explained by the productions made by speakers of Belfast English. Findings indicate that many of the issues that listeners encountered when hearing the Belfast accent were the result of vowel productions, such as those of the mouth, goose, square, and face vowels. This runs contrary to previous intelligibility research, which indicated that consonantal and suprasegmental deviations are the most detrimental to intelligibility.