Out-group Speakers Research Articles

The vocal side of empathy: neural correlates of pain perception in spoken complaints.

In the extensive neuroimaging literature on empathy for pain, few studies have investigated how this phenomenon may relate to everyday social situations such as spoken interactions. The present study used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to assess how complaints, as vocal expressions of pain, are empathically processed by listeners and how these empathic responses may vary based on speakers' vocal expression and cultural identity. Twenty-four French participants listened to short utterances describing a painful event, which were either produced in a neutral-sounding or complaining voice by both in-group (French) and out-group (French Canadian) speakers. Results suggest that the perception of suffering from a complaining voice increased activity in the emotional voice areas, composed of voice-sensitive temporal regions interacting with prefrontal cortices and the amygdala. The Salience and Theory of Mind networks, associated with affective and cognitive aspects of empathy, also showed prosody-related activity and specifically correlated with behavioral evaluations of suffering by listeners. Complaints produced by in- vs out-group speakers elicited sensorimotor and default mode activity, respectively, suggesting accent-based changes in empathic perspective. These results, while reaffirming the role of key networks in tasks involving empathy, highlight the importance of vocal expression information and social categorization processes when perceiving another's suffering during social interactions.

Dialect experience modulates cue reliance in sociolinguistic convergence

Expectation-driven convergence occurs when speakers shift their speech to approximate the language they expect rather than observe from their interlocutor. In Wade (2022), participants produced more monophthongal /aI/—a salient feature of Southern U.S. English—after hearing other Southern-accented features. Here, by decoupling acoustic and social information with a dialect-label manipulation task, we investigate what types of cognitive associations account for this behavior: indirect socially-mediated associations that rely on recognizing that monophthongal /aI/ and other Southern-accented variants are both associated with the social category “Southern,” or direct associations between variants that rely on tracking their common co-occurrence at the individual level. We find that both acoustic and social-label cues trigger convergence, but in-group speakers from the South rely on acoustic cues, while out-group speakers from outside of the South are best cued by social-category labels. Results indicate a crucial role of dialect experience in the encoding and utilization of sociolinguistic knowledge.

Resting parasympathetic activity is associated with malodor-induced change in perceived foreignness of speakers.

To protect against infection, individuals have evolved context-dependent pathogen-avoidant strategies, including selective social behaviors aimed at avoiding foreign individuals who may possess greater risk of infection. Parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity is associated with social engagement and regulation of the classical immune system but has not been widely investigated in relation to changes in intergroup perception and the behavioral immune system. The current research investigated the relationship between parasympathetic activity and perceived foreignness of in and outgroup speakers during exposure to a pathogen-relevant odor (butyric acid). High-frequency heart rate variability was measured at rest and while participants rated foreignness of speakers with and without the odor present. Findings show that exposure to the odor was associated with higher foreignness perceptions of outgroup speakers and lower foreignness perceptions of ingroup speakers. This effect was especially evident among individuals with higher resting parasympathetic activity. These results suggest that the PNS may play a role in changes in social perceptions during a behavioral immune response.

Teachers’ development of a socially-stigmatized dialect

This study investigates the learning of linguistic structures associated with African American English (AAE) among four non-AAE-speaking teachers of AAE-speaking students. It considers implicit and explicit learning/development of a second dialect in two novel ways. First, it focuses on the understanding of a socially-stigmatized dialect by speakers of a socially-valued dialect, the language of the classroom. Second, it considers the knowledge of individual AAE features by outgroup speakers, about which little, if anything, was previously known. This research highlights the linguistic situation in one urban high school over the course of an academic year, focusing on four teachers’ proficiency in their students’ dialect as demonstrated by teacher performance on a translation task administered four times over the course of an academic year. Results indicate that features cluster into three levels of proficiency, with the highest level attained by the teacher who was most deliberate and explicit in her second dialect (D2) development. This work contributes to the small but growing canon of research on D2 development.

How in-group bias influences the level of detail of speaker-specific information encoded in novel lexical representations.

An important issue in theories of word learning is how abstract or context-specific representations of novel words are. One aspect of this broad issue is how well learners maintain information about the source of novel words. We investigated whether listeners' source memory was better for words learned from members of their in-group (students of their own university) than it is for words learned from members of an out-group (students from another institution). In the first session, participants saw 6 faces and learned which of the depicted students attended either their own or a different university. In the second session, they learned competing labels (e.g., citrus-peller and citrus-schiller; in English, lemon peeler and lemon stripper) for novel gadgets, produced by the in-group and out-group speakers. Participants were then tested for source memory of these labels and for the strength of their in-group bias, that is, for how much they preferentially process in-group over out-group information. Analyses of source memory accuracy demonstrated an interaction between speaker group membership status and participants' in-group bias: Stronger in-group bias was associated with less accurate source memory for out-group labels than in-group labels. These results add to the growing body of evidence on the importance of social variables for adult word learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

How In-Group Bias Influences Source Memory for Words Learned From In-Group and Out-Group Speakers.

Individuals rapidly extract information about others’ social identity, including whether or not they belong to their in-group. Group membership status has been shown to affect how attentively people encode information conveyed by those others. These findings are highly relevant for the field of psycholinguistics where there exists an open debate on how words are represented in the mental lexicon and how abstract or context-specific these representations are. Here, we used a novel word learning paradigm to test our proposal that the group membership status of speakers also affects how speaker-specific representations of novel words are. Participants learned new words from speakers who either attended their own university (in-group speakers) or did not (out-group speakers) and performed a task to measure their individual in-group bias. Then, their source memory of the new words was tested in a recognition test to probe the speaker-specific content of the novel lexical representations and assess how it related to individual in-group biases. We found that speaker group membership and participants’ in-group bias affected participants’ decision biases. The stronger the in-group bias, the more cautious participants were in their decisions. This was particularly applied to in-group related decisions. These findings indicate that social biases can influence recognition threshold. Taking a broader scope, defining how information is represented is a topic of great overlap between the fields of memory and psycholinguistics. Nevertheless, researchers from these fields tend to stay within the theoretical and methodological borders of their own field, missing the chance to deepen their understanding of phenomena that are of common interest. Here, we show how methodologies developed in the memory field can be implemented in language research to shed light on an important theoretical issue that relates to the composition of lexical representations.

To believe or not to believe? How voice and accent information in speech alter listener impressions of trust.

Our decision to believe what another person says can be influenced by vocally expressed confidence in speech and by whether the speaker-listener are members of the same social group. The dynamic effects of these two information sources on neurocognitive processes that promote believability impressions from vocal cues are unclear. Here, English Canadian listeners were presented personal statements (She has access to the building) produced in a confident or doubtful voice by speakers of their own dialect (in-group) or speakers from two different "out-groups" (regional or foreign-accented English). Participants rated how believable the speaker is for each statement and event-related potentials (ERPs) were analysed from utterance onset. Believability decisions were modulated by both the speaker's vocal confidence level and their perceived in-group status. For in-group speakers, ERP effects revealed an early differentiation of vocally expressed confidence (i.e., N100, P200), highlighting the motivational significance of doubtful voices for drawing believability inferences. These early effects on vocal confidence perception were qualitatively different or absent when speakers had an accent; evaluating out-group voices was associated with increased demands on contextual integration and re-analysis of a non-native representation of believability (i.e., increased N400, late negativity response). Accent intelligibility and experience with particular out-group accents each influenced how vocal confidence was processed for out-group speakers. The N100 amplitude was sensitive to out-group attitudes and predicted actual believability decisions for certain out-group speakers. We propose a neurocognitive model in which vocal identity information (social categorization) dynamically influences how vocal expressions are decoded and used to derive social inferences during person perception.

Neural architecture underlying person perception from in-group and out-group voices

In spoken language, verbal cues (what we say) and vocal cues (how we say it) contribute to person perception, the process for interpreting information and making inferences about other people. When someone has an accent, forming impressions from the speaker's voice may be influenced by social categorization processes (i.e., activating stereotypical traits of members of a perceived ‘out-group’) and by processes which differentiate the speaker based on their individual attributes (e.g., registering the vocal confidence level of the speaker in order to make a trust decision). The neural systems for using vocal cues that refer to the speaker's identity and to qualities of their vocal expression to generate inferences about others are not known. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how speaker categorization influences brain activity as Canadian-English listeners judged whether they believe statements produced by in-group (native) and out-group (regional, foreign) speakers. Each statement was expressed in a confident, doubtful, and neutral tone of voice. In-group speakers were perceived as more believable than speakers with out-group accents overall, confirming social categorization of speakers based on their accent. Superior parietal and middle temporal regions were uniquely activated when listening to out-group compared to in-group speakers suggesting that they may be involved in extracting the attributes of speaker believability from the lower-level acoustic variations. Basal ganglia, left cuneus and right fusiform gyrus were activated by confident expressions produced by out-group speakers. These regions appear to participate in abstracting more ambiguous believability attributes from accented speakers (where a conflict arises between the tendency to disbelieve an out-group speaker and the tendency to believe a confident voice). For out-group speakers, stronger impressions of believability selectively modulated activity in the bilateral superior and middle temporal regions. Moreover, the right superior temporal gyrus, a region that was associated with perceived speaker confidence, was found to be functionally connected to the left lingual gyrus and right middle temporal gyrus when out-group speakers were judged as more believable. These findings suggest that identity-related voice characteristics and associated biases may influence underlying neural activities for making social attributions about out-group speakers, affecting decisions about believability and trust. Specifically, inferences about out-group speakers seem to be mediated to a greater extent by stimulus-related features (i.e., vocal confidence cues) than for in-group speakers. Our approach highlights how the voice can be studied to advance models of person perception.

Preschoolers’ credulity toward misinformation from ingroup versus outgroup speakers

The current research examined preschoolers’ credulity toward misinformation from ingroup versus outgroup speakers. Experiment 1 showed that when searching for a hidden toy, Caucasian English monolingual 4-year-olds were credulous toward the false testimony of a race-and-accent ingroup speaker, despite their firsthand observations of the hiding event, but were skeptical when the false testimony was provided by a race-and-accent outgroup speaker. In the same experiment, 3-year-olds were credulous toward the false testimony of both speakers. Experiment 2 showed that when the false testimony was provided by a same-race-only or same-accent-only speaker, 4-year-olds were not particularly credulous or skeptical. The findings are discussed in relation to how intergroup bias might contribute to the selective credulity in the 4-year-olds as well as the factors that might explain the indiscriminate credulity in the 3-year-olds.

Social and structural constraints in lectal cohesion

This paper analyzes co-variation among six sociolinguistic variables of Brazilian Portuguese (diphthongal /ẽ/, coda /r/-retroflexion, coda /r/-deletion, nominal number agreement, third person subject-verb agreement, and first person subject-verb agreement), in a set of structurally related and unrelated variables. The main objective is to assess which social and linguistic factors promote the co-occurrence of different language variants in speakers’ speech. The results show that co-variation can occur both between structurally related variables (e.g. the syntactic variables) and structurally unrelated ones (e.g. /r/-retroflexion and nominal agreement), as well as between variables of different domains (phonological and syntactic variables). We argue that, socially, lectal cohesion is a result of greater density of communication among peers than with out-group speakers, as shown by a higher degree of lectal cohesion among less mobile speakers, living in central areas, and whose parents were also born in the community. Linguistically, independent variables such as phonic salience (which has been demonstrated to correlate with multiple sociolinguistic variables) underlie patterns of co-variation more generally, as less salient variants tend to co-occur more often than more salient ones.

“Mista, Are You in a Good Mood?”: Stylization to Negotiate Interaction in an Urban Hawai’i Classroom

AbstractThe transgressive use of language by out-group speakers, or crossing is used in a variety of ways to achieve both affiliative and disaffiliative ends among youths. However, crossing can also be used as an affiliative resource in asymmetrical power relations between teachers and students. Reporting on the findings of a 1.5 year ethnography of an English/language arts classroom at a multilingual and multiethnic public middle school in Hawai’i, this paper explores one teacher’s use of stylization practices which take the form of crossing. The teacher stylizes students’ voices through ventriloquizing, which is an affiliative resource when strategically embedded in ritual oppositional frames of interaction. However, when embedded in other interactional frames, this transgressive use of language results in acts of insult or mocking. I analyze audio recordings of naturally occurring interaction to explore how Hawai’i Creole (or Pidgin) is used transgressively in reported speech by the teacher, an “out-group” individual, for negotiating interactions in his English language arts classroom. Instances of transgressive language emerge as artfully performed strategies that provide a rich site for the construction of affiliative identities. The use of crossing allows the teacher to take liminal stances between offense and respect to strategically manage student participation in this diverse classroom. These findings point to the important role that crossing plays in acts of identity through reported speech where the performance of crossing within positively valued, jocular oppositional classroom rituals demonstrates the capacity for crossing as a contributing factor to the emergence of a shared sense of community in the classroom.

How to do things with slurs: Studies in the way of derogatory words

This article provides an original account of slurs and how they may be differentially used by in-group and out-group speakers. Slurs are first distinguished from other terms and their role in social interaction is discussed. A new distinction is introduced between three different uses of slurs: the (a) paradigmatic derogatory use, (b) non-paradigmatic derogatory use, and (c) non-derogatory in-group use. I then account for their literal meaning and explain how a family-resemblance conception of category membership can clarify our understanding of the various natural-language uses of slurs, (a)–(c). The focus is restricted primarily to race-based and sex-based slurs used in the context of English speakers, and the article concludes with desiderata to be met by any subsequent analyses of slurs.

Parasite primes make foreign-accented English sound more distant to people who are disgusted by pathogens (but not by sex or morality)

To avoid disease, people should maintain close ties with ingroup members but maintain distance from outgroup members who possess novel pathogens. Consistent with this disease-avoidance hypothesis, pathogenic stimuli, as well as increased personal vulnerability to disease, are associated with xenophobic and ethnocentric attitudes. Researchers assume that this disease-avoidance process is an automatic emotional response that compels negative attitudes and behavioral avoidance. However, when outgroup contact can represent fitness costs or benefits, and when group membership is an uncertain cue to infection risk, it becomes a fitness advantage for a social perceiver to track group membership and thus infection risk. Given that accents can be a cue to group membership, we predicted that the perception of linguistic similarity to ingroup speakers and dissimilarity from outgroup speakers would increase with individual differences in pathogen disgust, and that this association would be most apparent when threat of disease was salient. This hypothesis was confirmed in two experiments. Further, the mechanism was domain specific—disgust due to sexual acts and moral violations did not moderate perceived linguistic distance. The disease-avoidance mechanism is not just an automatic disgust-based reaction; it also operates through the cognitive appraisal of social distance.

Attitudes to spoken Australian English: Judgements of ingroup and ethnic outgroup speakers∗

(1989). Attitudes to spoken Australian English: Judgements of ingroup and ethnic outgroup speakers. Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 149-160.

Language Attitudes, Frames of Reference, and Social Identity: A Scottish Dimension

It was predicted from social identity and self-categorisation theories that ingroup speakers should attract more positive evaluations than outgroup speakers, especially when both are of equal status. However, the ingroup may be redefined by changes in the levels of categorisation salient to the perceiver. In Scotland, both intra-national and international levels are relevant at various times. Using the matched guise technique, in three conditions each possible pairing of middle class versions of Dundee, Glasgow (both Scottish) and RP English accents were presented to teenagers from Dundee. On ratings of speaker status, likely employment, and solidarity there was a clear pattern of ingroup favouritism. As predicted, the ingroup accents were evaluated positively and out-group negatively. Thus, Glasgow accents were evaluated negatively when contrasted with Dundee accents, but positively when contrasted with RP. Moreover, levels of ingroup favouritism correlated positively with measures of identification with Scotland. The data suggest language attitudes are susceptible to considerable variation, depending on the level of self-categorisation salient to the perceiver. Implications for issues of ethnolinguistic vitality and for the similarity attraction hypothesis are discussed.