Predicting talker intelligibility: Contrasting talkers’ racialized identities and listeners’ racializations

Abstract

Recent studies have found that speech intelligibility can be manipulated by changing the race of a person whose face is used as a visual prime presented with a spoken sentence (Babel & Russell, 2015; McGowan, 2015; Kutlu et al., 2022). These findings suggest that the differences in racializing faces—the process whereby people ascribe a race to an individual an explanation for observed traits and behaviors and to predict future behavior–may mediate speech intelligibility. However, other data suggests that the contrastive effect arises more from perceived differences in vocal behavior (McLaughlin et al., 2022). In this study, we address this discrepancy in previous research. We examine variability in the process of racialization from faces and voices by contrasting the predictive power of talkers’ self-reported racialized identities on speech intelligibility with that of racializations reported by listeners. We examine this in an experiment assessing the audio-only and audio-visual intelligibility in noise of 28 talkers of various racialized identities by 242 listeners. The listeners both reported the speech they heard, and indicated what they believed the talkers’ racialized identities to be. Data collection is complete, and analysis is ongoing. [Funded by NIH grant R21 DC018070]