Bring on the crowd! Using online audio crowdsourcing for large-scale New England dialectology and acoustic sociophonetics

This study aims to (i) identify current geographic patterns of major New England dialect features relative to prior work in previous generations and (ii) test the effectiveness of large-scale audio crowdsourcing by using Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect sociophonetic data. Using recordings from 626 speakers across the region, this is the largest acoustic sociophonetic study ever conducted in New England. Although face-to-face fieldwork will always be crucial in sociolinguistics and dialectology, we believe that online audio-recorded crowdsourcing can play a valuable complementary role, offering an efficient way to greatly increase the scope of sample sizes and sociolinguistic knowledge.