Monday, March 4th @ 12:30 PM, Kent 120

Sociophonetic perception: experience or stereotypes?

The acoustic form of speech sounds vary systematically across
different social groups.  One of the most significant and influential
findings in speech perception research in the last 20 years is that
individuals appear to use their knowledge of socially meaningful
phonetic variation when identifying phonemes.  This talk focuses on a
series of experiments that attempt to understand whether this process
of talker normalization relies on knowledge of socially stratified
variation accrued across a lifetime of language use, or social
stereotypes about the way that different groups (women vs. men, gay
vs. straight) talk.  Two conclusions emerge from these studies. First,
it is exceptionally difficult to disentangle real-world knowledge from
knowledge of stereotypes.  Second, insomuch as we can tease these
apart, we find evidence that these effects seem to be driven by
stereotypes rather than by real-world experience.