Sparse models, such as used in Eisenstein, Smith, and Xing (2011), that identify small sets of predictive features would be more suited for exploratory analysis.
crowdsourcing has already been used to obtain perception data for sociolinguistic research-for example, to study how English utterances are perceived differently across language communities (Makatchev and Simmons 2011) and to obtain native-likeness ratings of speech samples (Wieling et al.