Does seeing an Asian face make speech sound more accented?

Attention, Perception & Psychophysics
Yi Zheng, Arthur G Samuel

Abstract

Prior studies have reported that seeing an Asian face makes American English sound more accented. The current study investigates whether this effect is perceptual, or if it instead occurs at a later decision stage. We first replicated the finding that showing static Asian and Caucasian faces can shift people's reports about the accentedness of speech accompanying the pictures. When we changed the static pictures to dubbed videos, reducing the demand characteristics, the shift in reported accentedness largely disappeared. By including unambiguous items along with the original ambiguous items, we introduced a contrast bias and actually reversed the shift, with the Asian-face videos yielding lower judgments of accentedness than the Caucasian-face videos. By changing to a mixed rather than blocked design, so that the ethnicity of the videos varied from trial to trial, we eliminated the difference in accentedness rating. Finally, we tested participants' perception of accented speech using the selective adaptation paradigm. After establishing that an auditory-only accented adaptor shifted the perception of how accented test words are, we found that no such adaptation effect occurred when the adapting sounds relied on visual informati...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jul 11, 2019·Language and Speech·Woobong ShinJeffrey J Holliday
Jun 3, 2018·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·Sarah Gittleman, Kristin J Van Engen
Jun 4, 2019·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·Charlotte R Vaughn

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