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Now You See Me, Now You Mishear Me: Raciolinguistic accounts of speech perception in different English varieties
Preprint   Open access

Now You See Me, Now You Mishear Me: Raciolinguistic accounts of speech perception in different English varieties

PsyArXiv
Center for Open Science
01/25/2022
DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/rvm8j
url
https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2020.1835929View
Published (Version of record)This article has now been published in a journal and has been peer-reviewed by subject experts. This version may differ significantly from the preprint version. Access restricted to faculty, staff and students
url
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rvm8jView
Preprint (Author's original)This preprint has not been evaluated by subject experts through peer review. Preprints may undergo extensive changes and/or become peer-reviewed journal articles. Open Access

Abstract

Listeners can access information about a speaker such as age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background upon hearing their speech. However, it is still not clear if listeners use these factors to assess speakers’ speech. Here, an audio-visual (matched-guise) test is used to measure whether listeners’ accentedness judgments can be modulated depending on the type of face that they see. American and Indian English were used as different English varieties and presented with either a White female face or a South Asian female face. Results show that listeners’ accentedness judgments increased for Indian English compared to American English. Importantly, the increase in accentedness judgments was also observed when both American English and Indian English were presented with a South Asian face compared to a White face. These findings suggest that linguistic evaluations are modulated by non-linguistic factors and that speech perception is socially gated.
Education Psychology Social Sciences behavioral disciplines and activities Gender identity Indian English languages & linguistics Linguistics otorhinolaryngologic diseases psychology and cognitive sciences Socioeconomic status Speech perception

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