Doctoral Dissertation Research: The effect of social information on the perception of native- and nonnative-accented speech

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

When perceiving speech, listeners use non-speech information from their environment in addition to the speech itself. One visual cue that informs listeners' understanding of speech is their perception of a talker's ethnicity. This doctoral dissertation improvement grant project examines the cognitive and linguistic mechanisms that drive this effect.

In addition to informing scientific models of speech processing, the results of this project can shed light into the inequalities faced by speakers of English in the United States who belong to a minority race and/or speak English as a second language. This work can therefore serve as an important step toward addressing and reducing inequalities stemming from linguistic and racial biases.

This dissertation project investigates social priming – how social information affects perception of speech – for both native- and nonnative-accented speech. In a series of experiments, group-wide behavioral data and individual differences data are integrated to examine the time-course and specificity of social priming effects, their relationship with implicit racial associations, and their effect on perceptual adaptation to nonnative accents.

To ensure appropriate power for examination of individual differences, a large number of participants are recruited through online data collection. Transcription tasks are used to assess listeners' ability to understand target sentences presented in background noise. For the investigation of perceptual adaptation to nonnative accent, curve-fitting mixed-effects models are used to estimate performance over the course of the experiment.

Ultimately, results of this interdisciplinary work will provide foundational knowledge of how linguistic and racial biases impact how humans process speech.

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.