Political affiliation affects spoken language processing

Abstract

Listeners typically perform better on intelligibility tasks with native compared to nonnative speakers (e.g., Tsurutani, 2012). Listeners from multilingual, urban locations perform better on intelligibility tasks than those from non-multilingual, rural locations (Kutlu et al. 2022). A recent study from our lab found that listeners with more liberal political affiliation also perform better, but the study did not control for a possible relationship between more liberal political affiliation and living in an urban environment. To further investigate, 54 listeners from an urban location and 27 listeners from rural locations were recruited. Listeners heard sentences from two native (US, India) and two nonnative speakers of English (Korean, French) and typed their responses. Listeners then completed a political-affiliation questionnaire. A linear mixed-effects model with fixed effects for group, speaker, and political-affiliation score, and all interactions were fit to the data. The model revealed a significant interaction between group and political affiliation score. For the urban listeners, more liberal listeners performed better overall than more conservative listeners. For the rural listeners, political affiliation did not reach significance. Taken together, this study demonstrates that political affiliation predicts performance even when exposure (urban versus rural) is controlled.