Abstract
This study tests the effects of intonational contours and filtering conditions on listener judgments of ethnicity to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding on how prosody influences these judgments, with implications for austomatic speech recognition systems as well as speech synthesis. In a perceptual experiment, 40 American English listeners heard phrase-long clips which were controlled for pitch accent type and focus marking. Each clip contained either two H* (high) or two L+H* (low high) pitch accents and a L-L% (falling) boundary tone, and had also previously been labelled for broad or narrow focus. Listeners rated clips in two tasks, one with unmodified stimuli and one with stimuli lowpass filtered at 400 Hz, and were asked to judge whether the speaker was “Black” or “White”. In the filtered condition, tokens with the L+H* pitch accent were more likely to be rated as “Black”, with an interaction such that broad focus enhanced this pattern, supporting earlier findings that listeners may perceive African American Language as having more variation in possible pitch accent meanings. In the unfiltered condition, tokens with the L+H* pitch accent were less likely to be rated as Black, with no effect of focus, likely due to the fact that listeners relied more heavily on available segmental information in this condition. These results enhance our understanding of cues listeners rely on in making social judgments about speakers, especially in ethnic identification and linguistic profiling, by highlighting perceptual differences due to listening environment as well as predicted meaning of specific intonational contours. They also contribute to our understanding of the role of how human listeners interpret meaning within a holistic context, which has implications for the construction of computational systems designed to replicate the properties of natural language. In particular, they have important applicability to speech synthesis and speech recognition programs, which are often limited in their capacities due to the fact that they do not make such holistic sociolinguistic considerations of the meanings of input or output speech.
Highlights
The questions of whether and how listeners can distinguish Black American and White American voices have been a popular topic in phonetic and sociolinguistic studies over the past 50 years, with implications for both the linguistic understanding of perception as well as issues of social inequality
This is a serious lacuna, because as a result of their perceptual salience, intonational features are especially important in the analysis of linguistic profiling, or what noted linguist John Baugh has recently called “Speaking While Black”, the phenomenon by which African Americans experience discrimination, sight-unseen, because their speech may act as an indicator of their race (2015)
The results of this study which tested listeners’ ratings of clips as “Black” or “White” under two listening conditions, original, and low pass filtered, while controlling for specific intonational phenomena of pitch accent type (L+H* vs. H*) and utilizing clips that had broad vs. narrow focus, yielded results that show that listeners appear to interpret these intonational phenomena in different, sometimes opposite, ways in filtered vs. original listening conditions
Summary
The questions of whether and how listeners can distinguish Black American and White American voices have been a popular topic in phonetic and sociolinguistic studies over the past 50 years, with implications for both the linguistic understanding of perception as well as issues of social inequality (see for review Thomas and Reaser 2004; Thomas et al, 2010). Using data from a corpus built in that experiment, the current methodology is designed to test the hypothesis that listeners are more likely to rate tokens with an L+H* contour and/or narrow focus marking as having been uttered by a Black speaker Understanding how these pitch accents and focus marking strategies are produced by speakers and perceived by listeners will help us arrive at a better understanding of the intonational phenomena that may trigger certain types of ethnicity judgments, as well as how these phenomena may be programable to assist computational systems in categorizing user data. Understanding both how speakers use these prosodic differences as well as how they are perceived by listeners will inform future research on naturalistic speech recognition and generation that functions more effectively for a wider variety of speakers and users
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