Sociophonetic Variation in Speech Perception

Finished · Social Influences on Speech

Summary

This is an overview article that surveys previous literature connecting the effects of social information on speech perception. Drager discusses many experiments that demonstrate that a wide variety of social information can impact perception. She not only explains that phonetic information in the audio signal can impact perceived social identity of a voice, but a similar effect occurs in the other direction. Namely, descriptive and visual information about a person impacts how their voice is perceived. Perhaps, most straightforward in this regard was an experiment in which participants were shown images of either males or females and given a sound on the /s/-/ʃ/ continuum. Since the frequency differences contrasting the two sounds is impacted by vocal tract size, /s/ spoken by a male can have similar energy spectrum profiles compared to /ʃ/ spoken by a female. The experiment found that speakers were more likely to identify the same sound as /ʃ/ when paired with a female face (and vice versa for /s/ for males). In all, speech perception is heavily modulated by past social experience and current social context.