The Effect of Ethnicity on Identification of Korean American Speech

Abstract

Research on ethnic varieties of American English has found that listeners can identify speaker ethnicity from voice alone at above-chance rates. This study aims to extend this research by focusing on the perception of race and ethnicity in the voices of ethnically Korean speakers of English. Bilingual Korean Americans in California provided samples of English speech that were rated by 105 listeners. Listeners rated the speakers on their likelihood of being a certain race or ethnicity (including Asian and White). Listeners who were Korean themselves rated the speakers as more likely to be Asian and Korean, whereas non-Asian listeners rated the speakers as more likely to be White. Non-Asian listeners also demonstrated a negative correlation between rating a voice as Asian and rating a voice as belonging to a native-born American, while Asian listeners did not. Finally, a positive correlation between pitch and perceived Asianness was found for female speakers, corresponding to listeners’ metalinguistic commentary about the hallmarks and stereotypes of Asian or Asian American speech. The findings implicate the listener’s own ethnic identity and familiarity with a speech variety as an important factor in sociolinguistic perception.