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. 2022 Jun 28;12(7):845.
doi: 10.3390/brainsci12070845.

Adaptation to Social-Linguistic Associations in Audio-Visual Speech

Molly Babel  1
Affiliations

Adaptation to Social-Linguistic Associations in Audio-Visual Speech

Molly Babel. Brain Sci. .

Abstract

Listeners entertain hypotheses about how social characteristics affect a speaker's pronunciation. While some of these hypotheses may be representative of a demographic, thus facilitating spoken language processing, others may be erroneous stereotypes that impede comprehension. As a case in point, listeners' stereotypes of language and ethnicity pairings in varieties of North American English can improve intelligibility and comprehension, or hinder these processes. Using audio-visual speech this study examines how listeners adapt to speech in noise from four speakers who are representative of selected accent-ethnicity associations in the local speech community: an Asian English-L1 speaker, a white English-L1 speaker, an Asian English-L2 speaker, and a white English-L2 speaker. The results suggest congruent accent-ethnicity associations facilitate adaptation, and that the mainstream local accent is associated with a more diverse speech community.

Keywords: intelligibility; linguistic expectations; perceptual adaptation; social stereotypes; speech in noise.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
A box-and-whisker plot of the empirical results and the range of the posterior predictive distributions for intelligibility, plotted as TSR scores, for the four talkers separated by high and low predictability sentences.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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