Doctoral Dissertation Research: Integration of Social Information in Sociolinguistic Perception

在一个人开口说话之前，听众可以根据各种线索对他将如何说话形成预期。此外，研究表明，这些期望实际上会影响人们在说话时如何倾听和理解对方。然而，在某些情况下，人们可能对说话者有多种不同的信息来源，这可能会导致对这个人的声音的相互矛盾的期望。这篇论文研究了听众如何利用说话人的种族和国籍来告知他们对说话人的声音的期望。无论少数民族与本国社会的关系如何，他们经常被视为外国人。这种观点可能导致各种各样的歧视，包括对他们的熟练程度和身份合法性的惩罚性判断。考虑到现实世界中面对面交流的一个方面，即听者可以有几个关于说话者的信息来源，包括视觉信息、关于说话者国籍的信息和说话者的名字，本研究的总体目标是更多地阐明听者在解释和评估讲话时如何理解这些潜在的竞争信息来源。关注对少数族裔演讲者和他们的演讲的期望，可能会激发公众观众反思他们对这些演讲者有意识或无意识的期望。这个博士论文项目包括一系列的实验，主要有两个任务：一个是噪音中的演讲任务，听众在嘈杂的环境中听到许多“说话者”的句子，并被要求输入他们听到的内容；另一个是社会属性评级任务，他们在各种尺度上评估“说话者”，包括他们认为“说话者”的口音和清晰程度。这些实验的不同之处在于听众所遇到的“说话者”是如何被代表的；将使用照片的各种组合来提示演讲者是少数民族还是来自多数民族，写传记描述非移民或移民国民，写名字来提示演讲者是否属于少数民族。通过分析听者在噪音语音任务中的回答的准确性，以及在社会属性评分任务中的外国口音和语音清晰度，来评估哪些类型的“说话者”更容易被理解，并被视为没有外国口音且易于理解。研究结果可以为旨在减少对少数民族语言歧视的教育和工作场所培训项目提供信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Listeners can form expectations about how a person will speak based on a variety of cues, before that person utters a word. Furthermore, research has shown that those expectations can, in fact, influence how individuals hear and interpret the person when they do speak. However, there are instances where individuals might have multiple, distinct sources of information about a speaker that could lead to conflicting expectations about how that person will sound. This dissertation examines how listeners use cues to a speaker’s race and nationality to inform their expectations about what the speaker sounds like. Minority ethnic groups are often viewed as foreigners regardless of their relationship within their home society. This view can lead to various kinds of discrimination, including penalizing judgements about their proficiency as well as the legitimacy of their identities. By considering an aspect of face-to-face communication in the real world, namely that listeners can have several sources of information about speakers available to them, including visual information, information about a speaker’s nationality, and a speaker’s name, the overall goal of this research is to shed more light on how listeners make sense of these potentially competing sources of information when interpreting and evaluating speech. Focusing on expectations about how minoritized speakers and their speech in particular are viewed may inspire a public audience to reflect about the expectations they hold, consciously or unconsciously, about these speakers.This doctoral dissertation project consists of a series of experiments with two main tasks: a speech-in-noise task in which listeners hear sentences in noisy environments from many “speakers” and are asked to type what they hear, and a social attributes ratings task in which they evaluate the “speakers” on various scales including how foreign accented and clear they believe the speech of the “speakers” were. The experiments differ based on how the “speakers” that listeners encounter are represented; various combinations of photos to cue a speaker as racially minoritized or from a majority ethnic group, written biographies describing a non-immigrant or immigrant national, and written first names to cue a speaker as racially minoritized or not will be used. The accuracy of listeners’ responses from the speech-in-noise task and foreign accentedness and clarity of speech ratings from the social attributes ratings task are analyzed to assess which types of “speakers” are better understood and viewed as having speech that is devoid of foreign accents and as easy to understand. Findings may inform training programs in educational and workplace settings that aim to reduce language discrimination against ethnic minorities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.