Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:09:13.019Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Liu vs. Liu vs. Luke? Name influence on voice recall

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2018

BRIANNE SENIOR ,
JOBIE HUI  and
MOLLY BABEL Open the ORCID record for MOLLY BABEL [Opens in a new window]
BRIANNE SENIOR
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
JOBIE HUI
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
MOLLY BABEL*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Molly Babel, 2613 West Mall, Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4 Canada. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Listeners are better at remembering voices speaking in familiar languages and accents, and this finding is often dubbed the language-familiarity effect (LFE). A potential mechanism behind the LFE relates to a combination of listeners’ implicit knowledge about lower level phonetic cues and higher level linguistic processes. While previous work has established that listeners’ social expectations influence various aspects of linguistic processing and speech perception, it remains unknown how such expectations might affect talker recognition. To this end, Mandarin-accented English voices and locally accented English voices were used in a talker recognition paradigm in conditions which paired voices with stereotypically congruent names (Mandarin-accented English voice as Chen and locally accented English voice as Connor) and stereotypically incongruent names (vice versa). Across two experiments, listeners showed greater recall for the familiar, local voices than the Mandarin-accented ones, confirming the basic premise of the LFE. Further, incongruent accent/name pairings negatively affected listeners’ performance, although listeners with experience speaking Mandarin were less influenced by the incongruent accent/name pairings. These results indicate that the LFE, while relying largely on listeners’ ability to parse linguistic information, is also affected by nonlinguistic information about a talker’s social identity.

Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 39 , Issue 6 , November 2018 , pp. 1117 - 1146
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anderson-Clark, T. N., Green, R. J., & Henley, T. B. (2008). The relationship between first names and teacher expectations for achievement motivation. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 27, 94–99.Google Scholar
Babel, M., & Russell, J. (2015). Expectations and speech intelligibility. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137, 2823–2833.Google Scholar
Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94, 991–1013.Google Scholar
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2017). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.25. Retrieved February 11, 2017, from http://www.praat.org/ Google Scholar
Bradlow, A. R., & Alexander, J. A. (2007). Semantic and phonetic enhancements for speech-in- noise recognition by native and non-native listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 121, 2339–2349.Google Scholar
Bregman, M. R., & Creel, S. C. (2014). Gradient language dominance affects talker learning. Cognition, 130, 85–95.Google Scholar
Devos, T., & Banaji, M. R. (2005). American = white? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 447–466.Google Scholar
Drager, K. (2010). Sociophonetic variation in speech perception. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4, 473–480.Google Scholar
Drager, K. (2011). Speaker age and vowel perception. Language and Speech, 54, 99–121.Google Scholar
Edwards, R. (2006). What’s in a name? Chinese learners and the practice of adopting “English” names. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 19, 90–103.Google Scholar
Ganong, W. F. (1980). Phonetic categorization in auditory word perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 6, 110.Google Scholar
Garwood, S. G., Cox, L., Kaplan, V., Wasserman, N., & Sulzer, J. L. (1980). Beauty is only “name” deep: The effect of first name on ratings of physical attraction. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 10, 431–435.Google Scholar
Goggin, J. P., Thompson, C. P., Strube, G., & Simental, L. R. (1991). The role of language familiarity in voice identification. Memory & Cognition, 19, 448–458.Google Scholar
Hall, K. C., Allen, B., Fry, M., Mackie, S., & McAuliffe, M. (2016. Phonological CorpusTools, Version 1.2. [Computer program]. Retrieved from https://github.com/PhonologicalCorpusTools/CorpusTools/releases Google Scholar
Hay, J., Warren, P., & Drager, K. (2006). Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics, 34, 458–484.Google Scholar
Heffernan, K. (2010). English name use by East Asians in Canada: Linguistic pragmatics or cultural identity? Names, 58, 24–36.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. K., Westrek, E., Nazzi, T., & Cutler, A. (2011). Infant ability to tell voices apart rests on language experience. Developmental Science, 14, 1002–1011.Google Scholar
Johnson, K., Strand, E. A., & D’Imperio, M. (1999). Auditory–visual integration of talker gender in vowel perception. Journal of Phonetics, 27, 359–384.Google Scholar
Kang, O., & Rubin, D. L. (2009). Reverse linguistic stereotyping: Measuring the effect of listener expectations on speech evaluation. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 28, 441–456.Google Scholar
Kreiman, J., & Papcun, G. (1991). Comparing discrimination and recognition of unfamiliar voices. Speech Communication, 10, 265–275.Google Scholar
Laham, S. M., Koval, P., & Alter, A. L. (2012). The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 752–756.Google Scholar
Leirer, V. O., Hamilton, D. L., & Carpenter, S. (1982). Common first names as cues for inferences about personality. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 8, 712–718.Google Scholar
Mehrabian, A. (2001). Characteristics attributed to individuals on the basis of their first names. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 127, 59–88.Google Scholar
Munson, B., Jefferson, S. V., & McDonald, E. C. (2006). The influence of perceived sexual orientation on fricative identification. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 2427–2437.Google Scholar
Niedzielski, N. (1999). The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 18, 62–85.Google Scholar
Orchard, T. L., & Yarmey, A. D. (1995). The effects of whispers, voice‐sample duration, and voice distinctiveness on criminal speaker identification. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 9, 249–260.Google Scholar
Orena, A. J., Theodore, R. M., & Polka, L. (2015). Language exposure facilitates talker learning prior to language comprehension, even in adults. Cognition, 143, 36–40.Google Scholar
Papcun, G., Kreiman, J., & Davis, A. (1989). Long‐term memory for unfamiliar voices. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 85, 913–925.Google Scholar
Perrachione, T. K. (in press) Speaker recognition across languages. In S. Frühholz & P. Belin (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of voice perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Perrachione, T. K., Del Tufo, S. N., & Gabrieli, J. D. (2011). Human voice recognition depends on language ability. Science, 333, 595.Google Scholar
Perrachione, T. K., & Wong, P. C. (2007). Learning to recognize speakers of a non-native language: Implications for the functional organization of human auditory cortex. Neuropsychologia, 45, 1899–1910.Google Scholar
Pitt, M. A., & McQueen, J. M. (1998). Is compensation for coarticulation mediated by the lexicon? Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 347–370.Google Scholar
Pitt, M. A., & Szostak, C. M. (2012). A lexically biased attentional set compensates for variable speech quality caused by pronunciation variation. Language and Cognitive Processes, 27, 1225–1239.Google Scholar
Psychology Software Tools, Inc. [E-Prime 2.0]. 2012. Retrieved from http://www.pstnet.com Google Scholar
Rubin, D. L. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33, 511–531.Google Scholar
Samuel, A. G. (2001). Knowing a word affects the fundamental perception of the sounds within it. Psychological Science, 12, 348–351.Google Scholar
Sprietsma, M. (2013). Discrimination in grading: Experimental evidence from primary school teachers. Empirical Economics, 45, 523–538.Google Scholar
Staum Casasanto, L. (2008). Does social information influence sentence processing? Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society, 30, 799–804.Google Scholar
Stevenage, S. V., Clarke, G., & McNeill, A. (2012). The “other-accent” effect in voice recognition. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 24, 647–653.Google Scholar
Strand, E., & Johnson, K. (1996). Gradient and visual speaker normalization in the perception of fricatives. In D. Gibbon (Ed.), Natural language processing and speech technology: Results of the 3rd KONVENS Conference, Bielfelt, October, 1996 (pp. 14–26). Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tan, P. K. W. (2001). Englishised names? English Today, 17, 45–53.Google Scholar
Thompson, C. P. (1987). A language effect in voice identification. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1, 121–131.Google Scholar
Winters, S. J., Levi, S. V., & Pisoni, D. B. (2008). Identification and discrimination of bilingual talkers across languages. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123, 4524–4538.Google Scholar
Xie, X., & Myers, E. (2015). The impact of musical training and tone language experience on talker identification. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137, 419–432.Google Scholar
Yarmey, A. D. (1991). Descriptions of distinctive and non-distinctive voices over time. Journal of the Forensic Science Society, 31, 421–428.Google Scholar
Yi, H. G., Phelps, J. E., Smiljanic, R., & Chandrasekaran, B. (2013). Reduced efficiency of audiovisual integration for nonnative speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134, EL387–EL393.Google Scholar