Gamification in phonetic perception data collection: accent identification in North East England

Abstract

Gamification has been increasingly adopted across a range of domains, including academic research, thanks to its inclusive and scalable nature. Gamified tasks involve the incorporation of game elements such as points, levels, and rewards within non-game contexts to enhance participant’s engagement and motivation. Despite its online accessibility and motivating nature, however, there is no agreed protocol regarding which gamified elements to include in what type of tasks, especially in linguistic research which is mostly text-based. Rather than proposing a one-size-fits-all solution, this paper demonstrates the viability of audio-based gamified tasks, testing whether listeners from the North East of England, a region in which many residents believe there are fine-grained dialectal distinctions, can accurately distinguish speakers by location. In comparison to traditional identification tasks, our tasks were gamified through the inclusion of elements such as a points system, a post-task leaderboard, and rewards for high-scoring participants. Results indicate that within–North East speaker identification was a more difficult task for listeners than folk belief would indicate. We suggest that despite its limitations, gamification successfully replaced traditional per-participant incentives as a data collection strategy in a phonetic perception study.