When hearing someone speak, listeners do not simply receive the sound. Studies on monolingual English-speaking college students show variety of factors influence the way people perceive speech including expectation, experience with the speaker, and language background. Every time two people speak to each other, they make a constant stream of judgments, which influences communication for better or for worse. For example, brain scans indicate that speech from someone who speaks English as a first language will be processed differently than speech from someone who speaks English as a second language with a “foreign,” or non-native accent (Yi, Smiljanic, & Chandrasekaran, 2014). Other research indicates that a visual assessment of a talker’s race will impact the way speech is perceived. When a listener sees a face of an East Asian person, the listener will engage the processing system that they use for non-native speech before they even hear the speaker’s voice (Yi et al., 2014). Additionally, a photograph of an East Asian person or a photograph of a White person is paired with the same voice recording, listeners are worse at understanding the speech when it is paired with the photograph of the East Asian person (Rubin, 1992). This indicates that by the time a monolingual English speaker is around 18 years old, they are using visual racial perceptions to shift the way they listen.
For this processing phenomenon to occur, several things must be true in the minds of the listeners. First, they are able to visually identify racial categories. Second, they are able to identify linguistic differences between native and non-native speakers of a language. Furthermore, there is a connection made between the visual racial category and the linguistic cues. Listeners then use the racial category to form a linguistic expectation that impacts the way they process speech. Children are surely not born with these biases and expectations, so how do they develop?
According to Whitley and Kite (2010), visual development of racial categories happens gradually. They referenced studies that show infants do not use race to categorize, but that by 6 months, babies show implicit awareness of race and show familiarity biases. They also posited that explicit ability to categorize people visually by race does not fully manifest until somewhere between 5 and 9 years.
Similarly, Creel (2016) studied children’s ability to detect accents in. Using a Dutch accented speaker and a native accented speaker, she found that children from 3-5 years do not reliably use accents to differentiate speakers, and listeners from ages 5-7 only identified a Dutch speaker as non-native a little over half the time. However, there was a strong correlation between age and preference for the native speaker. The results all indicated that accent sensitivity increases with time.
I am interested in the way these two trends of development, visual categorization of race and perceptual categorization of non-native speech, interact from early childhood into adulthood. Some studies have already investigated the interaction of visual and linguistic racial perceptions in undergraduates. Campbell-Kiebler and McCollough (2012) used college students to test how students matched voices and faces according to perceived accentedness. They found that in this age group, there are well-defined perceptions of how well a voice fits a face according to the type of accent and how strong the listener thought the speaker’s accent was. When and how do children acquire this social knowledge? Do these perceptions change throughout adulthood? There is a gap in the literature and a need for more research in this area.
Works cited:
Creel, S. C. (2018). Accent detection and social cognition: evidence of protracted learning. Developmental Science, 21(2), e12524. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12524 (Links to an external site.)
McCullough, E. A., Clopper, C. G., & Wagner, L. (2017). The Development of Regional Dialect Locality Judgments and Language Attitudes Across the Life Span. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12984 (Links to an external site.)
Rubin, D. L. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33(4), 511–531. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00973770 (Links to an external site.)
Yi, H.-G., Smiljanic, R., & Chandrasekaran, B. (2014). The neural processing of foreign-accented speech and its relationship to listener bias. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 768. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00768 (Links to an external site.)
Whitley, B. E., & Kite, M. E. (2010). Psychology of prejudice and discrimination. Routledge.