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The Role of Socioindexical Expectation in the Perception of Gay Male Speech

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The Role of Socioindexical Expectation in the Perception of Gay Male Speech 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. in real time. High- and low-experience groups behaved similarly before social primes were introduced. As predicted, 1.2 Gay(-Sounding) Speech target fixations were delayed as a result of these primes, but only by high-experience listeners, Several acoustic correlates have been associated with demonstrating the expectation-mediating role of gay speech; these include vowel space size [19], listeners’ sociolinguistic experience. word-final stop release presence [20], phonation type [21], /s/ spectral quality [16, 29, 4, 14], pitch variation Keywords: speech perception, sociophonetics, [8, 12, 28], and /s/ duration [23, 13, 12, 3]. priming, social information, eye-tracking This study uses /s/ duration as the primary sociophonetic variable of interest. In production, 1. INTRODUCTION Linville found that, on average, gay men’s /s/ durations are 17ms longer than straight men’s, across 1.1. Socioindexical Expectation many phonological contexts [13]. Additionally, Bouavichith found a similar pattern in production: During speech perception, listeners are presented when controlled for speech rate, queer men had with a rich phonetic signal, which provides linguistic significantly longer /s/ durations in /sVC/, /sCVC/, information as well as information about the and /CVsC/ contexts [3]. This difference was not speaker’s identity. The results of sociophonetic found in word-final singleton /s/ contexts (/CVs/). investigations have demonstrated that speakers can In perception, Levon found that the combination signal social group identification using fine-grained of two socially encoded acoustic cues—wider pitch phonetic details, often below the level of speakers’ variation and lengthened /s/ segments—could consciousness [see 6]. reliably increase listeners’ valuations that the speaker Social information has also been shown to was gay [12]. When only one cue was used, however, influence speech perception. Previous research has valuations were not significantly altered. It seems, shown that social expectations about a speaker’s then, that multiple cues may be needed to make this gender [25], regional/national identity [18, 15], age social valuation. [9], ethnicity [24], and sexual orientation [11, 16], The present investigation asks if a social cue— among other factors [see 7 for a review] influence like those used in the socioindexical expectation listeners' linguistic decisions. Many of these studies literature—can be combined with an acoustic cue to inform listeners’ perception patterns, as measured 2.2.2. Stimuli and procedure using eye-tracking. Participants were presented with auditory stimuli 2. METHODS over headphones, and their eye movements were recorded using a remote monocular eye-tracker 2.1. Stimuli (EyeLink 1000 Plus, SR Research). The experiment consisted of five blocks of 48 Target auditory stimuli consisted of ten monosyllabic stimuli. During trials, participants were presented minimal triplets: (i) /s/-final, (ii) /s-stop/ cluster-final, with two images (target and competitor), and (iii) stop-final (e.g., ‘bass’, ‘bask’, ‘back’). corresponding to two of the three words in each Stimuli were produced by a straight, male, native minimal triplet. There were three trial types: singleton speaker of American English. /CVs/ vs. stop (e.g., ‘bass’/‘back’), cluster /CVsC/ vs. A single token of each target word was chosen for stop (e.g., ‘bask’/‘back’), and singleton /CVs/ vs. the test stimuli. Based on gay speakers’ /s/ duration cluster /CVsC/ (e.g., ‘bass’/‘bask’). Image positions rates from Bouavichith [3], waveform editing were counterbalanced across trials. The critical trials techniques were applied in Praat [2] to create three used for analysis were the singleton (/CVs/) vs. lengthened, natural-sounding /s/ durations—short, cluster (/CVsC/) contexts. A sample screen of a trial, mid, and long—for each token type (cluster, in which ‘bass’/‘bask’ was the target/competitor pair, singleton). These durations were constant across all can be seen in Figure 1. There were 120 critical trials stimuli (e.g., all ‘short’ condition cluster stimuli throughout the experiment. (bask, mosque, mast, etc.) had equal /s/ durations). These /s/ tokens all fell within the range of /s/ Figure 1: Sample screen of visual stimuli durations described as characteristic of gay speech in (‘bass’/‘bask’). prior investigations. The /s/ durations, thus, were longer in singleton contexts than in cluster contexts. Three levels were used to ensure variation in the /s/ durations heard by listeners, in order that duration would not become predictable over the course of the experiment, while approximating a somewhat representative sample of speech. Stimuli were cross-spliced to ensure that participants heard identical acoustic information for each target word up to the onset of /s/ (e.g., bass, bask) or a word-final singleton stop (e.g., back). To ensure that /s/ was identical in the /CVs/ and /CVsC/ conditions, but that the /s/ in /CVsC/ was not Each trial lasted approximately 10 seconds and coarticulatorily affected by the word-final stop, the /s/ consisted of the following sequence, in which all for the /CVsC/ stimuli was spliced from the /CVs/ auditory stimuli were produced by the same speaker: condition; this ensured that there were no spectral, 1. Both images were shown with the and only temporal, differences between cluster and accompanying audio: “Look at each image.” single /s/ conditions. Given the existing literature on 2. After 2000ms, a filled red circle appeared in spectral effects on the socioperception of gay speech, the center of the screen with the audio extra care was taken to avoid this confound. “Look at the middle dot.” The visual stimuli consisted of greyscale line 3. While the dot was still on the screen, drawings, corresponding to each of the 30 target participants then heard “My [relation] told words. me: ‘Now, look at ____.” 2.2. Procedure 4. Immediately before the auditory target word was heard, the red dot disappeared from the 2.2.1. Participants screen. Recording continued for 3000ms following the disappearance of the red dot. Thirty-four male undergraduate students, all native speakers of American English, participated in this The priming of social information took place in the study. Two participants were excluded (poor overall second half of the experiment, with a manipulation of performance and technical difficulties); data from 32 the [relation] term. In the first half of the experiment, participants were included in the analyses. the [relation] in the presentation phrase was socially neutral: participants heard ‘brother’, ‘mother’, ‘father’, and ‘friend’. Halfway through the possibly less socially marked in /CVs/ contexts, experiment, two additional relationship terms— greater pre- vs. post-exposure differences are ‘boyfriend’ and ‘partner’—were added to prime the predicted for cluster conditions (i.e., when listeners male speaker’s sexual orientation. Each target word heard ‘bask’ in a critical trial) than for single /s/-final in the critical trials was presented six times: three conditions (i.e., ‘bass’). This is supported by (three length conditions) in the pre-exposure phase production data, which shows a significant difference and three in the post-exposure phase. This resulted in between gay and straight men’s /s/ durations in 30 cluster stimuli and 30 singleton stimuli in each half /CVsC/ but not /CVs/ words [3]. Across the three /s/ of the experiment. duration conditions, the highest degree of ambiguity To gauge participants’ experience with gay between phrase-final lengthening and socially people and gay speech, participants also completed a motivated lengthening is predicted for the
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