Do faces speak volumes? Social expectations in speech comprehension and evaluation across three age groups

Abstract

An unresolved issue in social perception concerns the effect of perceived ethnicity on speech processing. Bias-based accounts assume conscious misunderstanding of native speech in the case of a speaker classification as nonnative, resulting in negative ratings and poorer comprehension. In contrast, exemplar models of socially indexed speech perception suggest that such negative effects arise only when a contextual cue to the social identity is misleading, i.e. when ethnicity and speech clash with listeners' expectations. To address these accounts, and to assess ethnicity effects across different age groups, three non-university populations (N = 172) were primed with photographs of Asian and white European women and asked to repeat and rate utterances spoken in three accents (Korean-accented German, a regional German accent, standard German), all embedded in background noise. In line with exemplar models, repetition accuracy increased when the expected and perceived speech matched, but the effect was limited to the foreign accent, and-at the group level-to teens and older adults. In contrast, Asian speakers received the most negative accent ratings across all accents, consistent with a bias-based view, but group distinctions again came into play here, with the effect most pronounced in older adults, and limited to standard German for teens. Importantly, the effects varied across ages, with younger adults showing no effects of ethnicity in either task. The findings suggest that theoretical contradictions are a consequence of methodological choices, which reflect distinct aspects of social information processing.

Fig 1. Visual stimuli.

Photographs of women of Asian ethnicity and white European ethnicity used in both the rating and sentence repetition tasks.

Fig 2. Sentence repetition.

Proportion of correctly repeated words in the respective speech context for the first and second half of the experiment, and for each listener group. Black dots represent the overall means and the colored dots show the individual participant means. The violin plots depict probability density, i.e. the wider the shaded area, the more data is located in that area. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

Fig 3. Accent ratings.

Estimated marginal means (from the fitted clmm model) for accentedness ratings in the respective speech context and listener group. Error bars represent confidence intervals.

Fig 4. Cumulative probabilities of accent ratings.

The length of each horizontal bar represents the modeled probability of a given rating based on the fitted clmm model. The dots represent the predicted values for a given rating in each condition.