Doctoral Dissertation Research: Integration of Social Information in Sociolinguistic Perception

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Listeners can form expectations about how a person will speak based on a variety of cues, before that person utters a word. Furthermore, research has shown that those expectations can, in fact, influence how individuals hear and interpret the person when they do speak. However, there are instances where individuals might have multiple, distinct sources of information about a speaker that could lead to conflicting expectations about how that person will sound. This dissertation examines how listeners use cues to a speaker’s race and nationality to inform their expectations about what the speaker sounds like. Minority ethnic groups are often viewed as foreigners regardless of their relationship within their home society. This view can lead to various kinds of discrimination, including penalizing judgements about their proficiency as well as the legitimacy of their identities. By considering an aspect of face-to-face communication in the real world, namely that listeners can have several sources of information about speakers available to them, including visual information, information about a speaker’s nationality, and a speaker’s name, the overall goal of this research is to shed more light on how listeners make sense of these potentially competing sources of information when interpreting and evaluating speech. Focusing on expectations about how minoritized speakers and their speech in particular are viewed may inspire a public audience to reflect about the expectations they hold, consciously or unconsciously, about these speakers. This doctoral dissertation project consists of a series of experiments with two main tasks: a speech-in-noise task in which listeners hear sentences in noisy environments from many “speakers” and are asked to type what they hear, and a social attributes ratings task in which they evaluate the “speakers” on various scales including how foreign accented and clear they believe the speech of the “speakers” were. The experiments differ based on how the “speakers” that listeners encounter are represented; various combinations of photos to cue a speaker as racially minoritized or from a majority ethnic group, written biographies describing a non-immigrant or immigrant national, and written first names to cue a speaker as racially minoritized or not will be used. The accuracy of listeners’ responses from the speech-in-noise task and foreign accentedness and clarity of speech ratings from the social attributes ratings task are analyzed to assess which types of “speakers” are better understood and viewed as having speech that is devoid of foreign accents and as easy to understand. Findings may inform training programs in educational and workplace settings that aim to reduce language discrimination against ethnic minorities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.