Language plays an important role in the way individuals express their social identities. In addition, listeners are sensitive to variation in pronunciation and employ their knowledge of language cues in order to recognize familiar voices and identify unknown talkers as members of particular social groups within society. This research project explores listeners' abilities to tune their speech perception systems according to their expectations of talkers' social identities. The socially marked pronunciation variant investigated in this study is the process of liaison in spoken French. Liaison consonants occur in word final position, and while they are never pronounced when the following word begins with a consonant, they can be pronounced when the following word begins with a vowel. A series of experiments will test whether French listeners internalize the variation in liaison use according to talker age (i.e., older talkers produce more liaison) and talker social class (i.e., talkers of higher social classes produce more liaison), and test whether French listeners use this information in speech perception. Participants will listen to short phrases which either do or do not contain liaison consonants. Analyses will include a calculation of the effect which the presence or absence of the liaison consonant has on word recognition of the following vowel initial word. The phrases will consist of spontaneous speech produced by various French speakers. Before listening to a talker's phrases, participants will be presented with information about the talker's age, social class, or both. Although all participants will listen to identical recordings, they will receive different information about the talkers' social identities. For example, some participants will be told that a given talker is a member of a higher social class, while other participants will be told that the same talker is a member of a lower social class. The expected outcome is that the presence or absence of liaison consonants will affect word recognition of the following vowel initial word according to the talker information the participants received. In other words, participants will tune their speech perception systems according to their expectations of the talkers' social identities.
The intellectual merit of this research lies primarily in its contribution to speech perception research. By testing the effects of social expectations on word recognition, this study effectively bridges the fields of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. The broader impacts of this project are many, as we live in a world in which we regularly come into contact with speakers of different accents, dialects, and languages, and in which we are challenged daily by social stereotypes. We can all benefit from learning about how socially marked pronunciation variants affect our perception. Participants in this study will be impacted directly through the debriefing process, while others will benefit from the dissemination of the research results. For instance, results from this study will inform automatic speech recognition research, aid French language instructors teaching about the liaison process, and inspire training programs which teach individuals about the impacts of language stereotypes on speech perception.
