Perception in context: How racialized identities impact speech perception

Abstract

When available, listeners use visual cues in speech perception [Zheng and Samuel (2017)]. However, it is not clear whether racialized identities impact listeners’ judgments, and if so, to what extent everyday experiences contribute to this. American, British, and Indian English varieties were paired with white and South Asian faces to test whether listeners’ intelligibility and accentedness judgments vary as a function of the faces that they saw and the varieties that they were listening to. A prior norming study was used to assess that sentences in all varieties had similar intelligibility. Listeners in a low-diverse environment (i.e., Gainesville, USA) versus a high-diverse environment (i.e., Montreal, Canada) were recruited. Racial diversity in listeners’ social network and their language diversity [i.e., language entropy, Gullifer and Titone (2020)] were measured. Results showed that listeners’ ability to transcribe sentences (i.e., intelligibility) decreased and their accentedness judgments increased for all English varieties when speech was paired with South Asian faces. Furthermore, these effects were modulated by participants’ social network diversity and their geographic context [Kutlu et al. (2021); (2022)]. We discuss the holistic impacts of the racialization of different language varieties and the role of multilingual and diverse context effects on speech perception.