Social priming: Exploring the effects of speaker race and ethnicity on perception of second language accents

Abstract

Listeners use more than just acoustic information when processing speech. Social information, such as a speaker’s race/ethnicity, can also affect listeners’ processing of the speech signal, in some cases facilitating perception. We aimed to build on this line of inquiry, beginning with a conceptual replication of work by McGowan (2015). Outcomes of this replication experiment successfully demonstrated that an East Asian prime can facilitate perception of Mandarin-accented English speech (as compared to a White prime). In a follow-up experiment, we next extended this dataset, increasing our sample size and introducing novel conditions to examine the effect of social primes (i.e., a Middle Eastern, White, or East Asian face, or a control silhouette image) on perception of Arabic-accented English. Results of this follow-up experiment were mixed. Despite an increased sample size, social priming effects for the Mandarin accent conditions were no longer significant. Additionally, for the Arabic accent conditions, subjects assigned to a Middle Eastern prime did not significantly outperform subjects assigned to a White prime or control prime as predicted. From the results of conditions with uncommon combinations of race/ethnicity and accent (e.g., an East Asian prime with Arabic accent), we conclude that the specificity of priming effects may depend on listeners’ level of familiarity with a given accent and/or racial/ethnic group. Altogether, the mixed outcomes in the current work motivate further inquiries to determine whether social priming effects for nonnative-accented speech may be smaller and/or more context-dependent than previously hypothesized.