Perceiving Identity through Accent

Beinhoff, Bettina

doi:10.3726/978-3-0353-0454-1

Cited by 27 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…That work has shown that linguistic cues (ranging from detailed acoustic/phonetic characteristics to lexical and syntactic usage) can carry social meaning-i.e., that listeners use such cues to infer aspects of the speaker's identity, such as their regional background, class or sexual orientation [53,79]. Listeners also use linguistic cues to judge how intelligent [16], credible [55], prestigious [6] or trustworthy [52] a speaker seems. These cues alone are salient enough to provoke reactions to the speaker's perceived identity, such that the outcome can be negative and even harmful.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Black or White but Never Neutral: How Readers Perceive Identity from Yellow or Skin-toned Emoji

Roberston

Magdy

Goldwater

2021

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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Research in sociology and linguistics shows that people use language not only to express their own identity but to understand the identity of others. Recent work established a connection between expression of identity and emoji usage on social media, through use of emoji skin tone modifiers. Motivated by that finding, this work asks if, as with language, readers are sensitive to such acts of self-expression and use them to understand the identity of authors. In behavioral experiments (n=488), where text and emoji content of social media posts were carefully controlled before being presented to participants, we find in the affirmative-emoji are a salient signal of author identity. That signal is distinct from, and complementary to, the one encoded in language. Participant groups (based on self-identified ethnicity) showed no differences in how they perceive this signal, except in the case of the default yellow emoji. While both groups associate this with a White identity, the effect was stronger in White participants. Our finding that emoji can index social variables will have experimental applications for researchers but also implications for designers: supposedly "neutral" defaults may be more representative of some users than others. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; • Applied computing → Sociology;

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Black or White but Never Neutral: How Readers Perceive Identity from Yellow or Skin-toned Emoji

Roberston

Magdy

Goldwater

2021

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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“…Within linguistics, the notion of a ‘native‐speaker’ has been problematized as a hypothetical ideal rather than a definable group of people (Beinhoff ).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Gregory (2004:249-50) 24 Cf Haddad (2008). 25 Within linguistics, the notion of a 'native-speaker' has been problematized as a hypothetical ideal rather than a definable group of people (Beinhoff 2013). 26 See Matras (2018) for an overview.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Silent Backdrop: Colonial Anxiety at the Border

Carver¹

2019

J Historical Sociology

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Through the categorization of movers, states determine and fix the belonging of migrants and thereby reproduce the nation‐state system as a global reality. Some movers, however, are deemed illegible and must be identified, labelled and thus brought within the system. This paper unpicks the legal consequences of a “coloniality of power” (Quijano, 2000) embedded within the border system as a whole. The paper demonstrates this process through a post‐colonial examination of Somali migration and the application of the 1951 Refugee Convention at the UK border. The Somali migrant, like his colonized predecessor, is constructed as an unreliable informant of him/herself; a “lying native” (Bhabha, 1994) whose identity can be ‘discovered’ by the tools of the enlightened West.

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“…In addition, it must be taken into consideration that linguistic experience is, of course, not the only listener-dependent variable which might affect judgments of native vs. non-native speech. As pointed out by Munro et al (2006), listener prejudices toward nonnative accents may decrease their tolerance for accented speech while positive attitudes toward a particular accent are likely to make listeners being more lenient in their judgments of (non-)native speech (e.g., Beinhoff, 2013;Kraut and Wulff, 2013;Kraut, 2014). The extent to which additional listener variables, such as language attitudes, are correlated with listener experience and their perception of L1 pronunciation certainly offers a fruitful incentive for future research.…”

Section: Perceived Nativeness Of First Language Pronunciationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If and to what extent speakers are perceived as native speakers depends on a variety of factors on behalf of both speakers and listeners. That is, the same speaker might be perceived differently by different listeners, whose perceptions are shaped and influenced by their own linguistic backgrounds and presumably by additional variables, such as their attitudes toward specific languages and accents (e.g., Beinhoff, 2013;Kraut and Wulff, 2013;Kraut, 2014). Furthermore, the present findings reveal that a speaker might "lose" their status as native speaker over time, which further supports the view that the native speaker-in the sense of reflecting a stable and coherent concept-as such might not exist, particularly in the context of bilingualism.…”

Section: Perceived Nativeness Of First Language Pronunciationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listeners’ Linguistic Experience Affects the Degree of Perceived Nativeness of First Language Pronunciation

Kornder

Mennen

2021

Front. Psychol.

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The aim of this study was to explore if and to what extent Austrian-English late sequential bilinguals who have been living in a second language (L2) environment for several decades are perceived to sound native in their first language (L1) when being compared to monolingual Austrian German (AG) control speakers. Furthermore, this investigation aimed to identify if listeners differ in their judgments of nativeness of L1 pronunciation depending on their own language background. For this purpose, two groups of native Austrian German listeners (N = 30 each), who differed regarding their linguistic background (Austrian German monolingual and Austrian German-English bilingual listeners) were asked to rate spontaneous speech samples produced by Austrian English bilingual and Austrian German monolingual speakers. Results showed that the bilingual L1 speech was perceived to sound overall less native compared to monolingual control speech. It was further observed that the two listener groups significantly differed in their perception of nativeness: Bilingual listeners were overall less likely to judge bilingual L1 pronunciation to sound non-native compared to monolingual listeners. To date, this is the first study to show that listener experience influences their perception of nativeness of L1 pronunciation and, thus, adds a new dimension to the notion of the native speaker.

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Perceiving Identity through Accent

Cited by 27 publications

References 0 publications

Black or White but Never Neutral: How Readers Perceive Identity from Yellow or Skin-toned Emoji

Black or White but Never Neutral: How Readers Perceive Identity from Yellow or Skin-toned Emoji

The Silent Backdrop: Colonial Anxiety at the Border

Listeners’ Linguistic Experience Affects the Degree of Perceived Nativeness of First Language Pronunciation

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