Socio-ethnic expectations of race in speech perception

Abstract

The social construct of race, as a group of individuals to be visually or auditorily discriminated between, or from, or against is a human construction much like speech itself. This talk will share the analyses of a speech production and a speech perception experiment designed to evaluate how familiar and unfamiliar listeners parse the auditory spectral information contained in words to assign the speech token to a racial category. Familiar North Carolina listeners (n = 28) and unfamiliar Indiana listeners (n = 44) heard ten hVd words produced by three male and three female, Black and White talkers from two geographically distant dialect regions in east and west North Carolina (n = 24). Listener groups assigned most speech tokens to the correct racial category with greater than chance accuracy. Statistically significant differences in listener use of socio-ethnically aligned vowels as produced in the words hid, heyd, head, mid and low front vowels the back vowel as produced in whod and the diphthongs as produced in hoyd, hide and howed were noted. Results will be discussed in the context of socio-ethic talker group membership and patterns of both listener accuracy and listener error in assigning talkers to racial groups.