image: Visual cues can change listeners' perception of others' accents, and people's past exposure to varied speech can also impact their perception of accents. Ethan Kutlu will discuss his team's work testing the impact that visual input and linguistic diversity has on listeners' perceived accentedness judgments in two different locations: Gainesville, Florida, and Montreal, Canada. view more
Credit: Ethan Kutlu
MELVILLE, N.Y., December 9, 2020 -- Visual cues can change listeners' perception of others' accents, and people's past exposure to varied speech can also impact their perception of accents.
Ethan Kutlu, from the University of Florida, will discuss his team's work testing the impact that visual input and linguistic diversity has on listeners' perceived accentedness judgments in two different locations: Gainesville, Florida, and Montreal, Canada.
The session "Diverse environments and their impact on accentednenss judgements," will take place Dec. 9 at noon Eastern U.S. as part of the 179th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will be held virtually Dec. 7-10.
In their study, participants completed an accentedness judgement task, where they were shown either a white or a South Asian face while listening to sentences in American, British, or Indian English.
The researchers discovered that the participants in Gainesville perceived an increase in accentedness when the visual input changed from a white face to a South Asian face. They did not observe the same effect for listeners from Montreal.
The researchers chose Gainesville because it houses one of the largest and most popular public universities in Florida, so it provided access to many Hispanic and white students. Secondarily, unlike southern Florida, Gainesville has many bilingual speakers who often use only English in their everyday conversations.
This allowed the researchers to examine the extent to which being raised in a bilingual community but then switching to a monolingual context impacted speech perception.
Montreal was selected because it exemplified a contrastive situation, since many people were raised in a bilingual community and continued to maintain linguistic diversity in their environments. In Montreal, different races and ethnicities were more interconnected throughout.
"Our preliminary findings suggest that exposure to different accents and racial and ethnic categories on a regular basis could impact perceived accentedness judgements," said Kutlu.
###
MORE MEETING INFORMATION
USEFUL LINKS
Main meeting website: https://acousticalsociety.org/overview-ave/
Technical program: https://acousticalsociety.org/technical-program/
Press Room: http://acoustics.org/world-wide-press-room/
WORLDWIDE PRESS ROOM
In the coming weeks, ASA's Worldwide Press Room will be updated with additional tips on dozens of newsworthy stories and with lay language papers, which are 300-500 word summaries of presentations written by scientists for a general audience and accompanied by photos, audio, and video. You can visit the site during the meeting at http://acoustics.org/world-wide-press-room/.
PRESS REGISTRATION
We will grant free registration to credentialed journalists and professional freelance journalists. If you are a reporter and would like to attend, contact the AIP Media Line at 301-209-3090. For urgent requests, staff at media@aip.org can also help with setting up interviews and obtaining images, sound clips or background information.
VIRTUAL MEDIA BRIEFINGS
Press briefings will be held virtually during the conference. Credentialed media can register in advance by emailing media@aip.org include your full name and affiliation in the message. The official schedule will be announced as soon as it is available and registered attendees will be provided login information via email.
ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world's leading journal on acoustics), Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. For more information about ASA, visit our website at http://www.acousticalsociety.org.