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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: molly.babel@ubc.ca
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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 

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