Social Expectation Improves Speech Perception in Noise

• Published in: Language and speech Vol. 58; no. 4; pp. 502 - 521
• Main Author: McGowan, Kevin B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01-12-2015; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Accentuation; Algorithms; Asian Continental Ancestry Group; Auditory Perception; Bayesian Statistics; China; Chinese languages; Cues; English language; European Continental Ancestry Group; Evidence; Experiments; Funding; Humans; Laboratories; Listening; Listening Comprehension; Noise; Non-native accent; Phonetics; Phonology; Priming; Recognition (Psychology); Semantics; Social Cognition; Social factors; Speaking; Speech; Speech Perception; Stereotypes; Stimuli; Whites; Word Recognition; China; Long Island New York; United States > US; sociophonetics; variation; Speech perception; exemplar models
• ISSN: 0023-8309; 1756-6053
• DOI: 10.1177/0023830914565191

Listeners’ use of social information during speech perception was investigated by measuring transcription accuracy of Chinese-accented speech in noise while listeners were presented with a congruent Chinese face, an incongruent Caucasian face, or an uninformative silhouette. When listeners were presented with a Chinese face they transcribed more accurately than when presented with the Caucasian face. This difference existed both for listeners with a relatively high level of experience and for listeners with a relatively low level of experience with Chinese-accented English. Overall, these results are inconsistent with a model of social speech perception in which listener bias reduces attendance to the acoustic signal. These results are generally consistent with exemplar models of socially indexed speech perception predicting that activation of a social category will raise base activation levels of socially appropriate episodic traces, but the similar performance of more and less experienced listeners suggests the need for a more nuanced view with a role for both detailed experience and listener stereotypes.