Presenter: Mary Mugeki – Psychology
Faculty Mentor(s): Rachel Weissler
Session: (Virtual) Oral Panel—Read, Speak and Act
This research explores the nature of linguistic perception upon hearing African American English versus Standard American English. By having speakers from each category and low pass filtering their speech, we can explore how people perceive both vernaculars given the emotional prosody (the emotion reflected in the melody of their voices). Low pass filtering the audio is beneficial since it removes the acoustic characteristics of speech and leaves only the melody. The importance in exploring the relationship between emotion and race is due to the cultural stereotyping that is prevalent in the U.S. which has an influence on perceptions of these two factors. The hypothesized results are that the Happy guises will be perceived as more white, the Angry guises will be perceived as more black, evidencing the power of emotional prosody on the perception of the speech signal. This research impacts the broader fields of speech perception and sociolinguistics, focusing on specifically the parts of the speech signal which influence socio-cultural perceptions in day to day life.