title: How the demographic makeup of our community influences speech perception.
abstract: Speech perception is known to be influenced by listeners' expectations of the speaker. This paper tests whether the demographic makeup of individuals' communities can influence their perception of foreign sounds by influencing their expectations of the language. Using online experiments with participants from all across the U.S. and matched census data on the proportion of Spanish and other foreign language speakers in participants' communities, this paper shows that the demographic makeup of individuals' communities influences their expectations of foreign languages to have an alveolar trill versus a tap (Experiment 1), as well as their consequent perception of these sounds (Experiment 2). Thus, the paper shows that while individuals' expectations of foreign language to have a trill occasionally lead them to misperceive a tap in a foreign language as a trill, a higher proportion of non-trill language speakers in one's community decreases this likelihood. These results show that individuals' environment can influence their perception by shaping their linguistic expectations.
authors.affiliation: Psychology of Language, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Shiri
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lev-Ari
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (Ecole Normale Supérieure, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Centre national de la recherche scientifique); Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Sharon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Peperkamp
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000162:Acoustics; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D003710:Demography; D004777:Environment; D006801:Humans; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology; D014833:Voice Quality