Bidirectional effects of priming in speech perception: Social-to-lexical and lexical-to-social

Abstract

Previous perceptual research demonstrates that providing listeners with a social prime, such as information about a speaker's gender, can affect how listeners categorize an ambiguous speech sound produced by that speaker. We report the results of an experiment testing whether, in turn, providing listeners with a linguistic prime, such as which word they are about to hear, affects categorization of that speaker's gender. In an eye-tracking study testing for these bidirectional effects, participants (i) saw a visual prime (gender or lexical), (ii) heard an auditory stimulus drawn from a matrix of gender (female-to-male) and sibilant frequency (shack-to-sack) continua, and (iii) looked to images of the non-primed category. Social prime results replicate earlier findings that listeners’ /s-ʃ/ boundary can shift via visual gender information. Additionally, lexical prime results indicate that listeners’ judgments of speaker gender can shift with visual linguistic information. These effects are strongest for listeners at category boundaries where linguistic and social information are least prototypical. In regions of high linguistic and social prototypicality, priming effects are weakened or reversed. The results provide evidence of a bidirectional link between social and linguistic categorization in speech perception and its modulation by the stimulus prototypicality.

Language Contact

“…Taking this seriously requires contact linguists to be more specific about mechanisms at all levels, beginning with individuals. A relevant reference point is sociophonetic research which robustly shows that social-indexical information shapes perception in interaction with raw experience (Bouavichith et al, 2019;Kutlu et al, 2022;Hanulíková et al, 2012;Weissler, 2021;McGowan, 2015).…”

Language and Discrimination: Generating Meaning, Perceiving Identities, and Discriminating Outcomes

“…Squires interprets this effect as showing that social cues do not necessarily constrain linguistic perception. However, Bouavichith et al (2019) show that when participants are presented with visual linguistic information and asked to categorize the gender of the stimulus speaker's voice, sibilant identity of the visual stimulus shifts categorization of the perceived gender of the speaker's voice; this shift reflects normalization strategies across genders. According to Bouavichith et al, this bidirectional priming effect suggests not only that social information modulates linguistic categorization but also that linguistic information modulates social categorization.…”

Differences in Sibilant Perception between Gender Expansive and Cisgender Individuals

“…As noted in previous studies, a more forward position of the tongue toward the teeth during [s] production correlates with a higher COG, 7 which itself correlates with higher perceived femininity. [2][3][4][5] Additionally, while there have been no specific studies on gender-affirming voice and sibilant production, some investigations have looked more broadly into vocal tract manipulations including how "spreading the lips wider and bringing the tongue more forward" correlated with increased femininity. 29 Therefore, the results of this study could provide one additional tool for gender-affirming voice care, depending on the goals of the client.…”

“…Previous research on the sociophonetics of sibilant production and perception has largely been conducted using men's and women's voices. [1][2][3] Gender expansive (GE; i.e., transgender and/or nonbinary) people have seldom been explicitly recruited and the experimental design has relied on stereotypical gender cues, which typically involve fundamental frequency (f 0 ) and formant frequencies in the "normal" men's and women's ranges, 2,3 and when a neutral f 0 was used it was used in combination with neutral formant frequencies, 4,5 obscuring potential effects of vocal tract parameters when pitch is neutral. Previous studies use the same sibilant continuum across vocal tract conditions, where the goal of the study is to elicit a compensation effect of perception from the listener; that is, if the listener hears an ambiguous sibilant in the middle of [s] and [ R ], and is primed with a masculine gender cue, they are "compensating" in perception by shifting their perception to an [s] perception, for example.…”