Exploring effects of social information on talker-independent accent adaptation

Finished · Social Influences on Speech

Summary

This paper ran an experiment testing whether priming listeners with an East Asian face when presented with L2 English from an L1 Cantonese speaker facilitated participant transcription accuracy compared to when primed with a white face before the same type of speech. The results had a null result, meaning they found no effect of type of faced used in priming and transcription accuracy.

The theoretical import the authors were interested in is how listeners adjust speech categories when presented with accented speech. Two potential views are (i) phonemic recalibration, in which the expected distribution of a phonemic category is recalibrated to adjust for expected type of accented talker's productions and (ii) criteria-relaxation, in which the distribution is widened to incorporate more periphery-style productions into the fold of plausible productions of that category.