Sounding Black or White: priming identity and biracial speech.
Research has shown that priming one's racial identity can alter a biracial individuals' social behavior, but can such priming also influence their speech? Language is often used as a marker of one's social group membership and studies have shown that social context can affect the style of language that a person chooses to use, but this work has yet to be extended to the biracial population. Audio clips were extracted from a previous study involving biracial Black/White participants who had either their Black or White racial identity primed. Condition-blind coders rated Black-primed biracial participants as sounding significantly more Black and White-primed biracial participants as sounding significantly more White, both when listening to whole (Study 1a) and thin-sliced (Study 1b) clips. Further linguistic analyses (Studies 2a-c) were inconclusive regarding the features that differed between the two groups. Future directions regarding the need to investigate the intersections between social identity priming and language behavior with a biracial lens are discussed.
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL USA ; Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL USA.
Sarah E
SE
Gaither
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA USA.
Ariel M
AM
Cohen-Goldberg
Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University, Medford, MA USA.
Calvin L
CL
Gidney
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA USA.
Keith B
KB
Maddox
Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University, Medford, MA USA.
Calvin L
CL
Gidney
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA USA.
Calvin L
CL
Gidney
biracial identity; language; priming; speech perceptions; styleswitching