Weissler will also be hosting individual meetings with members of the department from 11:00 am - 1:00 pm on April 1st. This is a great opportunity to chat with her!
To sign up for an individual meeting, please email Colloquium Committee member Avery Osburn (Faculty) with your availability preferences.
Abstract
In order to better understand how American listeners cognitively interact with Black and White voices, I engage theories of language variation and social cognition from the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives. I will briefly touch upon my research that investigates how listeners alter their linguistic expectations when hearing Standardized American English (SdAE) and African American English (AAE) through two Electroencephalography (EEG) experiments. I will then focus on the aspect of my research that investigates how individuals process multidialectal linguistic input through emotional prosody and race perception studies. I focus on emotional prosody processing in the pursuit of understanding how identity perception relates to stereotypes, people’s experience with a variety, and results from cognition. African American English (AAE) is the most well-studied minoritized variety of English in the U.S., yet there is still much we do not know about cognitive processing of the variety. Understanding the mechanisms of AAE cognition is critical to building an inclusive model of language. Given the current sociopolitical climate in the United States where linguistic prejudice and discrimination continue to persist, the need to understand the impact of implicit linguistic bias is paramount (Craft, Wright, Weissler, & Queen 2020). In the first study, participants listened to isolated words from an African AAE speaker and an SdAE speaker in happy, neutral, and angry prosodies, and were asked to indicate perceived race and emotion of the speaker. Results showed that SdAE was rated whitest in the happy condition, whereas AAE was rated blackest in neutral and angry conditions. Across the board, however, there was a low base rate for correct identification of race, with a bias for picking the white voice. This choosing of the white voice aligns with hegemonic standards regarding normativity and neutrality, a colorblind effect of “I don’t see race, I don’t hear race.” However, there was an evidenced disconnect between the survey results with participants’ free-write responses, in which by and large they indicated their awareness of what the study was about (i.e., self-reporting that when the voices were “low and aggressive” they went with Black but when “high-pitched and happy,” they went with white). The second study tests listeners with varied experiences with AAE as demonstrated through exposure, familiarity, and usage measures. Participants listened to emotional and racially indexed voices while looking at faces; eye gaze to the matching face was measured. Varied exposure and familiarity did not show a statistically significant relationship with variation in eye gaze. The usage measure was just at the level of significance, suggesting that usage of African American English features can predict participants’ stereotyped looking preferences. This work contributes to further understanding of how social information and stereotypes interface with cognitive processing within a multidialectal frame, and leaves open questions to explore regarding which (if any) parts of the prosodic signal indicate emotion and perception.
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