Evaluational reactions to accented English speech

"Sounding Black": Speech Stereotypicality Activates Racial Stereotypes and Expectations About Appearance

Black Americans who are perceived as more racially phenotypical-that is, who possess more physical traits that are closely associated with their race-are more often associated with racial stereotypes. These stereotypes, including assumptions about criminality, can influence how Black Americans are treated by the legal system. However, it is unclear whether other forms of racial stereotypicality, such as a person's way of speaking, also activate stereotypes about Black Americans. We investigated the links between speech stereotypicality and racial stereotypes (Experiment 1) and racial phenotype bias (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants listened to audio recordings of Black speakers and rated how stereotypical they found the speaker, the likely race and nationality of the speaker, and indicated which adjectives the average person would likely associate with this speaker. In Experiment 2, participants listened to recordings of weakly or strongly stereotypical Black American speakers and indicated which of two faces (either weakly or strongly phenotypical) was more likely to be the speaker's. We found that speakers whose voices were rated as more highly stereotypical for Black Americans were more likely to be associated with stereotypes about Black Americans (Experiment 1) and with more stereotypically Black faces (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that speech stereotypicality activates racial stereotypes as well as expectations about the stereotypicality of an individual's appearance. As a result, the activation of stereotypes based on speech may lead to bias in suspect descriptions or eyewitness identifications.

The evolution of barriers to exploitation: Sometimes the Red Queen can take a break

We propose a general barrier theory as an evolutionary framework for understanding coevolutionary effects of conflicts of interest in natural and human systems. It is generalized from the barrier theory of cancer, which describes how cancer develops through the evasion of mechanisms, that block unregulated cellular reproduction and survival. Barriers are naturally evolved or artificially implemented mechanisms for blocking exploitation; restraints are mechanisms that impede but do not block exploitation. When conflicts of interest arise, selection will favor exploiters that are capable of overcoming barriers and restraints. When barriers are in place, they halt, at least temporarily, coevolutionary arms races (the Red Queen can stop running). Barriers occur in a broad spectrum of interactions characterized by conflicts of interest: barriers to cellular survival (apoptosis) and reproduction (cell cycle arrest) may block a virus from replicating its genome through reproduction of its host cell. Vaccines may completely protect against targeted pathogens. A plant may escape herbivory by evolving defensive chemicals that block herbivory. Obligate mutualisms may evolve when barriers to horizontal transmission favor symbionts that increasingly lose mechanisms that contribute to horizontal transmission. Here, we show how the barrier theory applies across a spectrum of natural and social systems.

Language as a Social Cue

Social groups are a pervasive feature of human life. One factor that is often understudied in the literature on person perception and social categorization is language. Yet, someone's language (and accent) provides a tremendous amount of social information to a listener. Disciplines across the social and behavioral sciences-ranging from linguistics to anthropology to economics-have exposed the social significance of language. Less social psychological research has historically focused on language as a vehicle for social grouping. Yet, new approaches in psychology are reversing this trend. This article first reviews evidence, primarily from psycholinguistics, documenting how speech provides social information. Next it turns to developmental psychology, showing how young humans begin to see others' language as conveying social group information. It then explores how the tendency to see language as a social cue has vast implications for people's psychological processes (e.g., psychological essentialism and trust) and also for society, including education and the law.

The Development of Regional Dialect Locality Judgments and Language Attitudes Across the Life Span

The development of language attitudes and perception of talker regional background was investigated across the life span (N = 240, age range = 4-75 years). Participants rated 12 talkers on dimensions of geographic locality, status, and solidarity. Children could classify some dialects by locality by age 6-7 years and showed adult-like patterns by age 8 years. Children showed adult-like status ratings for some dialects by age 4-5 years but were not fully adult-like until age 12 years. Solidarity ratings were more variable and did not exhibit a clear developmental trajectory, although some adult-like patterns were in place by age 6-7 years. Locality ratings were a significant but modest predictor of attitude ratings, suggesting that geographic knowledge is one contributor to language attitudes throughout development.

Perceived Language Proficiency and Person Perception

A group of native Mandarin Chinese speakers listened to tapes of six American females speaking in Chinese as their second language and evaluated each speaker on a set of 22 traits. Another group of native Chinese speakers listened to the same tapes and evaluated the six speakers on areas of Chinese language proficiency. The trait evaluations were then correlated with the language evaluations. Evaluations of 8 of the 22 traits showed significant correlations with evaluations in every language area. In contrast, seven other traits showed no significant correlations with any language area. Listening order significantly affected ratings on 12 of 22 traits. The results indicate two distinct groups of traits. One group is the traits that the trait judges somehow associated with language proficiency. In evaluating these traits, the judges depended on cues of language proficiency. The other group is the traits that apparently the trait judges evaluated independently of spoken language proficiency.

Effects of Turkish Language Reform on Person Perception

As a result of Turkish language reform, modern Turkish spans a range of styles from traditional to reformed. This range has political implications, in that traditional vocabulary is preferred by right-wing, traditionalist, and religious sectors of the population, while reformed terms are preferred by left-wing, modernist, and secular sectors. Turkish students were presented with matched pairs of paragraphs, differing only in use of traditional or reformed vocabulary, with the task of rating the authors on a variety of attitudinal and semantic differential scales. Students evaluated the two styles differently, and attributed attitudes and values to writers on the basis of vocabulary choice alone. In addition, such attributions and evaluations were related to the student's own political position.

Evaluative Reactions to Accented English

A sample population of 48 Anglo-Australian and 49 Greek-Australian male and female high school students made personality evaluations of standard Australian English and Greek-Australian-accented English. Ratings were along two dimensions (status and solidarity), and each speaker was rated on three passages representing an achievement-oriented, public context (school), a situation of intimacy and friendliness (home), and a friendly interaction in a public context (bus stop). On the status dimension, Greek-accented speakers were evaluated more negatively than Australian-accented speakers by both Anglo-Australian and Greek-Australian students. Greek-Australian female subjects were more extreme in their ratings than were Anglo-Australians or Greek-Australian males. On the bus stop passage, however, Greek-Australian subjects did not distinguish on the basis of accent. Finally, female subjects of both ethnic groups favored female speakers in the home context, while male subjects favored Anglo-Australian female speakers in the two public settings.

Personality Impressions Elicited by Accented English Speech

Eighty students, 40 male and 40 female, listened to tapes of male and female speakers from Australia, Britain, France, Greece, Italy, and Vietnam reading a short English passage. The aim of the study was to determine the impressions of an Australian-born audience to accented English speech and its effect upon judgments of the speakers' personalities. Factor analysis of the personality ratings revealed evaluative and dynamism dimensions. Results indicated an interaction between sex and nationality of speaker on both dimensions. Discussion focused on the combined influence of nationality and sex of speaker in eliciting impressions based on accented voices.

Language-based social preferences among children in South Africa

Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United States, Xhosa South African children preferred speakers of their first language (Xhosa) to speakers of a foreign language (French). Thus, social preferences based on language are observed not only among children with limited exposure to cultural and linguistic variation but also among children living in a diverse linguistic environment. Moreover, Xhosa children attending school in English expressed social preferences for speakers of English over speakers of Xhosa, even when tested by a Xhosa-speaking experimenter. Thus, children's language-based social preferences do not depend exclusively on preferences for more familiar or intelligible speech but also extend to preferences for speech that may convey higher status in the child's society.

Foreign accent conversion in computer assisted pronunciation training

Learners of a second language practice their pronunciation by listening to and imitating utterances from native speakers. Recent research has shown that choosing a well-matched native speaker to imitate can have a positive impact on pronunciation training. Here we propose a voice-transformation technique that can be used to generate the (arguably) ideal voice to imitate: the own voice of the learner with a native accent. Our work extends previous research, which suggests that providing learners with prosodically corrected versions of their utterances can be a suitable form of feedback in computer assisted pronunciation training. Our technique provides a conversion of both prosodic and segmental characteristics by means of a pitch-synchronous decomposition of speech into glottal excitation and spectral envelope. We apply the technique to a corpus containing parallel recordings of foreign-accented and native-accented utterances, and validate the resulting accent conversions through a series of perceptual experiments. Our results indicate that the technique can reduce foreign accentedness without significantly altering the voice quality properties of the foreign speaker. Finally, we propose a pedagogical strategy for integrating accent conversion as a form of behavioral shaping in computer assisted pronunciation training.

Accent trumps race in guiding children's social preferences

A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers' language, accent, and race on children's social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intelligibility of the speech, as children found the accented speech to be comprehensible, and did not make social distinctions between foreign-accented and foreign-language speakers. Finally, children chose same-race children as friends when the target children were silent, but they chose other-race children with a native accent when accent was pitted against race. A control experiment provided evidence that children's privileging of accent over race was not due to the relative familiarity of each dimension. The results, discussed in an evolutionary framework, suggest that children preferentially evaluate others along dimensions that distinguished social groups in prehistoric human societies.

The native language of social cognition

What leads humans to divide the social world into groups, preferring their own group and disfavoring others? Experiments with infants and young children suggest these tendencies are based on predispositions that emerge early in life and depend, in part, on natural language. Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language speakers, and preschool children preferentially select native-language speakers as friends. Variations in accent are sufficient to evoke these social preferences, which are observed in infants before they produce or comprehend speech and are exhibited by children even when they comprehend the foreign-accented speech. Early-developing preferences for native-language speakers may serve as a foundation for later-developing preferences and conflicts among social groups.

The power of the spoken word: sociolinguistic cues influence the misinformation effect

We investigated whether the sociolinguistic information delivered by spoken, accented postevent narratives would influence the misinformation effect. New Zealand subjects listened to misleading postevent information spoken in either a New Zealand (NZ) or North American (NA) accent. Consistent with earlier research, we found that NA accents were seen as more powerful and more socially attractive. We found that accents per se had no influence on the misinformation effect but sociolinguistic factors did: both power and social attractiveness affected subjects' susceptibility to misleading postevent suggestions. When subjects rated the speaker highly on power, social attractiveness did not matter; they were equally misled. However, when subjects rated the speaker low on power, social attractiveness did matter: subjects who rated the speaker high on social attractiveness were more misled than subjects who rated it lower. There were similar effects for confidence. These results have implications for our understanding of social influences on the misinformation effect.

EVALUATIONS OF SPANISH- AND ORIENTAL-ACCENTED ENGLISH SPEAKERS

The study investigated the evaluations received by individuals who speak English with a Spanish or Oriental accent. The judges in the study were 134 American college students (60 males, 74 females) who listened to one of six different audiotapes containing the speech sample of an individual (male or female) who spoke either unaccented English, Spanish -accented English, or Oriental-accented English. The speech samples were matched for degree of accent, intensity level, and speech rate. After listening to a tape, each judge was asked to rate the speaker using 16 personality scales. The results of a multivariate analysis of variance did not support the hypothesis that accented speakers are perceived as having less positive traits; however, significant main effects for gender of speaker and gender of judge, as well as a significant interaction between type of speech and gender of judge, were found.

Evaluational Reactions to Speech: The Role of Ethnic-Linguistic Status

Two groups of native Swedes listened to short stories, related in Swedish by Greek and American immigrants in Sweden, and rated the speakers on 15 personality traits as well as on five aspects of language proficiency. American speakers were rated more favorably than Greek speakers on two traits, namely, educated and capable. On language proficiency, Greeks and Americans were rated similarly except for the “grammar” aspect on which the latter obtained higher ratings. Speakers' time of residence in Sweden was strongly underestimated by raters, more for Americans than for Greeks. Correlations between ratings of personality and ratings of language proficiency were positive and significant on both affective and competence-related traits for the Greek speakers, while there were no significant correlations for the American speakers. The results are seen as giving support to the assumption that in judging personality from spoken language, attitudinal rather than linguistic factors play a major role, particularly if the speakers' ethnic-linguistic status is high.

Role of nonverbal communication in the perception of leadership

A 2 X 3 design was used to assess effects of nonverbal communication and sensory modality of presentation of stimuli on 107 undergraduates' perception of leadership. Nonverbal communication and modality of presentation had a significant effect on perception of leadership. These results suggest that nonverbal cues should be seen as essential in impression-formation.