Doctoral Dissertation Research: Integration of Social Information in Sociolinguistic Perception

博士论文研究：社会语言感知中的社会信息整合

• 批准号: 2314440
• 负责人: Annette D'Onofrio
• 金额: $ 1.07万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-07-15 至 2024-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2314440&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Integration; Social

Listeners can form expectations about how a person will speak based on a variety of cues, before that person utters a word. Furthermore, research has shown that those expectations can, in fact, influence how individuals hear and interpret the person when they do speak. However, there are instances where individuals might have multiple, distinct sources of information about a speaker that could lead to conflicting expectations about how that person will sound. This dissertation examines how listeners use cues to a speaker’s race and nationality to inform their expectations about what the speaker sounds like. Minority ethnic groups are often viewed as foreigners regardless of their relationship within their home society. This view can lead to various kinds of discrimination, including penalizing judgements about their proficiency as well as the legitimacy of their identities. By considering an aspect of face-to-face communication in the real world, namely that listeners can have several sources of information about speakers available to them, including visual information, information about a speaker’s nationality, and a speaker’s name, the overall goal of this research is to shed more light on how listeners make sense of these potentially competing sources of information when interpreting and evaluating speech. Focusing on expectations about how minoritized speakers and their speech in particular are viewed may inspire a public audience to reflect about the expectations they hold, consciously or unconsciously, about these speakers.This doctoral dissertation project consists of a series of experiments with two main tasks: a speech-in-noise task in which listeners hear sentences in noisy environments from many “speakers” and are asked to type what they hear, and a social attributes ratings task in which they evaluate the “speakers” on various scales including how foreign accented and clear they believe the speech of the “speakers” were. The experiments differ based on how the “speakers” that listeners encounter are represented; various combinations of photos to cue a speaker as racially minoritized or from a majority ethnic group, written biographies describing a non-immigrant or immigrant national, and written first names to cue a speaker as racially minoritized or not will be used. The accuracy of listeners’ responses from the speech-in-noise task and foreign accentedness and clarity of speech ratings from the social attributes ratings task are analyzed to assess which types of “speakers” are better understood and viewed as having speech that is devoid of foreign accents and as easy to understand. Findings may inform training programs in educational and workplace settings that aim to reduce language discrimination against ethnic minorities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

听众可以在一个人发出一个单词之前根据各种线索形成对一个人如何讲话的期望。此外，研究表明，这些期望实际上会影响个人在讲话时如何听到和解释这些期望。但是，在某些情况下，个人可能会有多个有关说话者的信息来源，这可能会导致对该人的声音的矛盾期望。这篇论文考试是听众如何利用演讲者的种族和国籍来告知他们对说话者听起来的期望。少数族裔群体通常被视为外国人，无论他们在家庭社会中的关系如何。这种观点可以导致各种歧视，包括对他们的熟练程度以及其身份合法性的判断。通过考虑现实世界中面对面沟通的一个方面，即听众可以拥有有关说话者可用的几种信息来源，包括视觉信息，有关说话者国籍的信息以及演讲者的名字，这项研究的总体目标是更多地阐明听众如何在解释和评估演讲时能够了解这些潜在竞争的信息来源。专注于对少数少女说话者及其演讲的期望，可能会激发公众的观众反思他们对这些讲话者的期望，有意识地或无意识地反映出这些讲话者的期望。本博士学位论文项目由一系列的实验组成了两项主要任务：在毫无意义的任务中，听众在噪音中听到的句子的句子，并在许多“噪音”中宣布，他们在许多“噪音”中遇到了一定的句子。在各种规模上评估“说话者”，包括外国的重音和清晰，他们认为“说话者”的讲话是。根据听众遇到的“说话者”的代表方式，实验不同。各种照片的组合以提示演讲者在种族少数或多数族裔中，描述非移民或移民民族的书面传记，并将以种族少数或不使用的说话来提示说话。分析了听众对语音任务的回答，外国的重音以及来自社会属性评级任务的语音评级的清晰度的准确性，以评估哪些类型的“说话者”的类型被更好地理解并被视为具有不介绍外国口音且易于理解的语音。调查结果可能会为旨在减少对少数民族的语言歧视的教育和工作场所环境中的培训计划提供信息。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响来审查标准，被认为是通过评估来获得的支持。