Sociophonetic Variation in Speech Perception

Drager, Katie

doi:10.1111/j.1749-818x.2010.00210.x

Cited by 92 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…A correlation between perceived age and vowel perception was found in both studies. Similar results have been found for other types of social indexicality, like gender and socio-economic status (see Drager (2010) for an overview). Not only social indexicality, but also believed accent appears to bias the perception of individual speech sounds, as it does in the accuracy rating tasks.…”

Section: Accent-induced Coder Biassupporting

confidence: 83%

Accent-induced coder bias

Sloos¹

2015

RCL

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Recent research has shown that speech perception can easily be influenced by the overall accent of the speaker. This paper investigates whether such accent-induced bias also occurs in speech transcriptions by professional and linguistically trained coders and to what extent such a bias may affect linguistic analyses. We compare the transcriptions of the Bären vowel in Standard German with the acoustic values of these vowels, as well as sociolinguistic analyses based on both of these. The results of the two analyses turn out to be considerably different. Further examination shows that the coders only partly relied on the acoustic values. The residual does not consist of random errors, but correlate with the degree of accentedness of the speakers. We conclude that this accent-induced coder bias led the coders to transcribe the codings according to their expectations about the pronunciation in the local dialect -expectations that were quite different from the acoustic reality.

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Section: Accent-induced Coder Biassupporting

confidence: 83%

Accent-induced coder bias

Sloos¹

2015

RCL

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“…For example, East Asian faces are less likely to be assumed to be native to the American English-speaking environment (Devos and Banaji, 2005). This assumption may alter the listener's perception by exaggerating the perceived nonnativeness of an East Asian speaker (Drager, 2010). Indeed, native English listeners incorporate visual cues more when they are listening to CV syllables produced by native Mandarin Chinese speakers relative to native English speakers (Hazan et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Reduced efficiency of audiovisual integration for nonnative speech

Phelps

Smiljanić

et al. 2013

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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The role of visual cues in native listeners' perception of speech produced by nonnative speakers has not been extensively studied. Native perception of English sentences produced by native English and Korean speakers in audio-only and audiovisual conditions was examined. Korean speakers were rated as more accented in audiovisual than in the audio-only condition. Visual cues enhanced word intelligibility for native English speech but less so for Korean-accented speech. Reduced intelligibility of Korean-accented audiovisual speech was associated with implicit visual biases, suggesting that listener-related factors partially influence the efficiency of audiovisual integration for nonnative speech perception.

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“…It seems clear that listeners are very sensitive to linguistically and socially determined variation in the speech signal (Ladefoged and Broadbent 1957;Campbell-Kibler 2010;Drager 2010;Foulkes 2010). Speech signals are acoustically rich and encode speaker characteristics, the speaking situation, and possibly through whom and where the signal was encountered before (Pierrehumbert 2002).…”

Section: Perceptual Learning: Convergence and Divergencementioning

confidence: 99%

Sound change in an urban setting: Category instability of the palatal fricative in Berlin

Jannedy

Weirich

2014

Laboratory Phonology

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Abstract:The differential categorization of identical stimuli depending on the presence of a prime is described as a perceptual divergence effect. We examined whether native listeners of the Berlin vernacular of German categorized identical acoustic stimuli differently in the explicit context of the names of two different districts of Berlin, assuming that listeners infer social information and linguistic stereotypes based on the names of these neighborhoods (Kreuzberg vs. Zehlendorf). All listeners categorized natural acoustic stimuli with synthetic fricatives synthesized along a continuum ranging from /ç/ to /ʃ/ as either Fichte /fɪçtə/ ('spruce') or fischte /fɪʃtə/ (1st person sg. 'to fish'). This variable was chosen because many young multiethnic speakers of Berlin German pronounce /ç/ as [ ʃ ] or [ɕ], and this alternation is highly associated with speakers with a migrant background from Kreuzberg. Data were gathered in a forced-choice identification task, and, for a subset of the participants, reaction times (RTs) were also gathered. Results indicate a differential categorization pattern depending on (1) the copresented information, i.e., Kreuzberg, Zehlendorf, or none (control), and (2) the age of the listeners, with older listeners being more affected by the co-presented information. While older listeners categorized significantly more /ʃ/ sounds in the context of Kreuzberg than in the control or Zehlendorf condition, younger listeners rated most /ʃ/ sounds in the control condition (no added information). Results are interpreted in terms of a potential sound change in progress: the loss of the phoneme contrast between /ç/ and /ʃ/.

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Sociophonetic Variation in Speech Perception

Cited by 92 publications

References 39 publications

Accent-induced coder bias

Accent-induced coder bias

Reduced efficiency of audiovisual integration for nonnative speech

Sound change in an urban setting: Category instability of the palatal fricative in Berlin

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