Adaptation to Social-Linguistic Associations in Audio-Visual Speech

Abstract

Listeners entertain hypotheses about how social characteristics affect a speaker’s pronunciation. While some of these hypotheses may be representative of a demographic, thus facilitating spoken language processing, others may be erroneous stereotypes that impede comprehension. As a case in point, listeners’ stereotypes of language and ethnicity pairings in varieties of North American English can improve intelligibility and comprehension, or hinder these processes. Using audio-visual speech this study examines how listeners adapt to speech in noise from four speakers who are representative of selected accent-ethnicity associations in the local speech community: an Asian English-L1 speaker, a white English-L1 speaker, an Asian English-L2 speaker, and a white English-L2 speaker. The results suggest congruent accent-ethnicity associations facilitate adaptation, and that the mainstream local accent is associated with a more diverse speech community.

Social priming of speech perception: The role of individual differences in implicit racial and ethnic associations.

“…By informing subjects in the experiment that the speakers were from Richmond (i.e., a suburb known for its Cantonese-speaking community), the authors may have strengthened their social priming manipulation. Further investigation within this community of listeners using audiovisual stimuli has also demonstrated that adaptation to L2 accent is impeded when the speaker is White (Babel, 2022), indicating that listeners anticipated the speaker to have L1 accent. In contrast, listeners were not impeded when listening to L1 accent produced by an Asian speaker.…”