Influence of raciolinguistic expectations on phoneme discrimination in Spanish-English bilinguals

Abstract

Work has demonstrated that social expectations about a speaker's identity can affect how their speech is perceived (e.g., D'Onofrio, 2019) and that interactional context, which is hypothesized to include non-linguistic cues like face or voice, may influence bilingual language processing (e.g., Grosjean, 2001). We unite these bodies of work to investigate how social information may be utilized in bilingual speech perception. In the United States, researchers have documented raciolinguistic ideologies around the use of Spanish, including that it is an indicator of Latinx identity (Rosa, 2016). To test whether racialized ideologies triggered language-specific processing strategies, thirty-one early or simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual speakers from the United States completed a visually primed phoneme discrimination task, categorizing bilabial stop continua (from /ba/ to /pa/). This design followed work demonstrating that Spanish-English bilinguals shifted their /b-p/ identification boundary as a function of the language they were told they'd be hearing (Gonzales et al., 2019). While raciolinguistic evaluations appeared to influence bilingual speech perception, they did not work the same way for each voice, suggesting the integration of multiple cues (both acoustic and social) in perception, and that the influence of raciolinguistic ideologies on speech perception may be contingent on complex aspects of the perceived speaker.