THE ROLE OF SOCIOINDEXICAL EXPECTATION IN THE PERCEPTION OF GAY MALE SPEECH Dominique A. Bouavichith University of Michigan
[email protected] ABSTRACT are grounded within exemplar frameworks, in which listeners use socially-coded exemplars to make During speech perception, listeners adjust predictions about upcoming speech. expectations when given social information about a In an experiment by Strand & Johnson [25], for speaker; this effect has been demonstrated using example, listeners heard gender-ambiguous tokens on many socially indexed phonetic cues. Previous a continuum from ‘shod’ to ‘sod’ while looking at sociophonetic studies have identified lengthened /s/ either a male or female face. Overall, seeing a female as one acoustic correlate of gay(-sounding) speech. face elicited more ‘shod’ responses, and seeing a male This eye-tracking study examines a) how face elicited more ‘sod’ responses. This reflects the information about a speaker’s social identity affects difference in /ʃ-s/ category boundaries between men listeners’ time course of lexical activation and b) how and women in production and shows that listeners are listener experience mediates this process. Participants able to use social information (in this case, presented completed a categorization task of /s/-lengthened visually) to aid in speech perception. /CVs/-/CVsC/ minimal pairs in two blocks: the first Some of these studies consider the perception of presented no information about speaker sexuality; the speech over the time course of one word or one second introduced auditory social primes indexing segment [5, 27, 15], which allows for fine-grained the speaker as gay. measures of processing that can test listeners’ Effects of social expectation were found as a response to sociolinguistic information as it is given function of listeners’ experience with gay speech.