Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ethnic Differences in Naive Listener Prominence Perception

本论文项目的目的是探讨naïve听众如何感知非洲裔美国英语（AAE）和欧洲裔美国英语（EAE）演讲中的突出地位，重点关注节奏和语调模式在其中所起的作用。韵律被认为是听者仅凭声音就能识别说话者种族的线索之一。这个研究项目是了解哪些语言因素与种族分析相关的重要一步。该研究对所有AAE和EAE使用者互动的社会环境具有重要意义，包括教育环境、警察-公民互动、政治和法律话语以及就业环境中的互动。例如，先前的研究将声音的种族识别与社会问题联系起来，例如拒绝向少数民族说话者提供住房或就业。韵律的差异也被证明是导致美国主流英语教师在课堂上误解AAE儿童的原因；因此，本研究的见解可以用于培训教师了解不同民族之间的韵律差异，从而提高AAE儿童在课堂上的教育质量。非裔美国人英语一直是许多公众和学术辩论的来源，并且仍然是美国研究最多的语言品种之一。许多社会语言学研究都集中在AAE的音段和句法结构上，但对其韵律（包括节奏模式和语调模式）的研究却很少。先前的研究表明，一些AAE的变体表现出与其他英语变体不同的韵律模式。这个项目使用心理语言学任务来调查naïve听众是如何感知韵律突出的：听众听到的“被说话者突出”的单词，这些单词从其他不突出的单词中脱颖而出。在一系列实验中，代表不同社会和地区背景的听众将对非裔美国人和白种人的讲话中单词的韵律突出程度进行评分。本研究的结果将有助于揭示听者用来感知韵律突出的语音线索，以及说话者和听者的种族在这种感知中所起的作用。

The goal of this dissertation project is to explore how naïve listeners perceive prominence in African American English (AAE) versus European American English (EAE) speech, with a focus on the role that patterns of rhythm and intonation play. Prosody has been named as one of the cues that listeners use to identify the ethnicity of speakers based on voice alone. This research project is an important step toward understanding what linguistic factors are relevant in ethnic profiling. The research has important implications for all social settings where AAE and EAE speakers interact, including educational settings, police-citizen interactions, political and legal discourse, and interactions in the context of employment. For example, previous research has linked ethnic identification of voices with societal issues such as denying housing or employment to minority speakers. Differences in prosody have also been shown to contribute to how AAE speaking children are misinterpreted in the classroom by mainstream American English speaking teachers; insights from this research could thus be used in training teachers about prosodic differences between ethnic varieties, thus improving the quality of education for AAE speaking children in the classroom.African American English has been the source of much public and academic debate and remains among the most studied language varieties in the United States. Much sociolinguistic research has focused on the sound segments and syntactic structure of AAE, but only sporadic research has investigated its prosody, which includes patterns of rhythm and intonation. Prior research has suggested that some varieties of AAE exhibit different prosodic patterns than other varieties of English. This project uses psycholinguistic tasks to investigate how naïve listeners perceive prosodic prominence: words that listeners hear as "highlighted by the speaker" and that stand out from other, non-prominent words. In a series of experiments, listeners representing different social and regional backgrounds will rate the prosodic prominence of words in speech from speakers of both African American and Caucasian ethnicities. The results of this study will help uncover the phonetic cues that listeners use to perceive prosodic prominence and the role that the ethnicity of the speaker and listener plays in such perception.