DATE: Tuesday, June 26, 2018
TIME: 11:00 AM
LOCATION: RCB 7402

TITLE: Exemplar Theory, Reverse Linguistic Stereotyping, Or Something Else?: Evidence From A Response Time Study.

The extent to which a speaker’s ethnicity affects how their speech is perceived and evaluated remains unclear, despite a steadily growing body of research. Older studies have traditionally maintained that presenting a non-white face to native English-speaking listeners seems to trigger a type of bias that could result in worse comprehension and even hearing a non-existent ‘foreign accent.’ Exemplar-based studies, on the other hand, have proposed that these findings merely reflect a mismatch between listeners’ expectations and the actual speech signal. This dissertation project aims to contribute to this body of research through a series of interconnected, quantitative experiments which investigate in what ways visually-salient speaker characteristics influence speech perception, processing speed and intelligibility. In this presentation the findings of a response time study will be discussed in the context of the current theoretical framework.

Chair: Dr. Keir Moulton
Senior Supervisor: Dr. Murray Munro
Supervisor: Dr. Tracey Derwing
Supervisor: Dr. Yue Wang