No news is good news: Social priming and the intelligibility of American-accented English

Abstract

Social information, such as a speaker’s race, can affect the perception of speech. In some cases, these social primes facilitate perception, while in others they can lead to reduced speech intelligibility. For example, a picture of an East Asian face may facilitate perception of Mandarin Chinese-accented English but interfere with perception of American-accented English. Using a large sample recruited online, we aimed to test whether there is a link between implicit racial associations and the effects of social primes on the perception of American-accented English. We examined priming for a White versus an East Asian prime and for a White versus a Latina prime. In both cases, the difference between priming conditions was non-significant. Subjects also completed two implicit association tests, examining associations of these races/ethnicities with the constructs American versus Foreign and Good versus Bad. Individual differences in implicit associations did not predict social priming for either cohort. However, in some cases they did predict overall performance on the speech perception task. We discuss how these findings diverge from prior work on multiple accounts, and how consideration of the racial and linguistic diversity of listeners’ interpersonal networks may improve our understanding of individual differences in social priming susceptibility.