The Influence of Speakers' Physical Appearance on Listeners' Accented Speech Comprehension
Open Access
- Author:
- Danielson, Carly
- Area of Honors:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Adriana Van Hell, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Richard Alan Carlson, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- psychology
linguistics
bilingualism
speech comprehension - Abstract:
- As the levels of intercultural communication and negotiation rapidly increase, an increasing number of people now speak English as a second language, many of whom speak English with a foreign accent. Research demonstrates that comprehending foreign-accented speech tends to be more effortful than comprehending native-accented speech (for a review, see Cristia, Seidl, Vaughn, Schmale, Bradlow, & Floccia, 2012). Previous research has mostly presented speech in isolation. However, it is unknown how a speaker’s facial appearance, cuing speaker identity, influences listeners’ speech comprehension and their perception of whether the speaker has a native or foreign accent. Facial/physical appearance possibly creates language expectations and may allow for erroneous perception that a speaker has a foreign accent because the speaker physically appears “foreign”, even if this speaker actually has a native accent. Through two experiments, one conducted at Penn State, and the second at Beijing Normal University in Beijing, China, I sought to examine how faces cuing the speaker’s identity create language expectations about speech, and the impact this has on the comprehension of American-accented and Chinese-accented English. At Penn State, White American monolinguals, and at Beijing Normal University, Chinese native English L2-speakers listened to American-accented and Chinese-accented English sentences. The spoken sentences were preceded by a picture of an Asian face or a White face, which yielded two congruent face-accent conditions (White Face/American Accent; Asian Face/Chinese Accent) and two incongruent face-accent conditions (Asian Face/American Accent; White Face/Chinese Accent). Immediately after hearing the sentence, listeners transcribed the sentence. English monolinguals’ American-accented sentence transcription accuracy was lower when preceded by an Asian face than when preceded by a White face. For Chinese-accented sentences, transcription accuracy did not differ for White and Asian faces. This indicates that faces cuing ethnicity only trick our ears in native-accented, but not in foreign-accented speech. The results are interpreted in terms of Reverse Linguistic Stereotyping (RLS) and accent-driven asymmetries in face-accent processing.