Stuffed toys and speech perception

“These include familiarity with an accent (Gass and Varonis, 2006), cultural expectations (Hay and Drager, 2010), and intrinsic listener motivation (Evans and Iverson, 2007).”

“The years of research examining episodic lexicons also led to the emergence of a highly productive research area investigating the effects of phonetically cued social variation in speech perception (see Drager, 2010 and Thomas, 2002 for reviews).”

“In fact, merely evoking a specific region – through the name of a place being written on a response sheet (Niedzielski, 1999) or through exposure to a stuffed toy that brings into mind a particular place (Hay and Drager, 2010) – causes listeners who are familiar with the dialects of both regions to categorize vowels i…”

“Hay & Drager (2010) found that New Zealand listeners shifted their vowel classification patterns depending on whether stuffed kangaroos and koalas (associated with Australia) or stuffed kiwis (associated with New Zealand) were present in the room.”

“Even stuffed animals have been used as an effective association prompt to shift listeners’ perceptions of sounds (Hay and Drager, 2010).”

“…mentally link linguistic structures to social information, a contention that has been supported by social evaluation studies (Campbell-Kibler, 2008; Fridland, Bartlett, & Kreuz, 2004; Plichta & Preston, 2005) as well as other sociophonetic work (Hay & Drager, 2010; Niedzielski, 1999; Strand, 1999).”

“Hay and Drager (2010) found that females were more likely to respond with a raised token if shown a kangaroo and males were more likely to respond with a raised token if shown a kiwi.”

“…even require a belief about the speakers themselves; merely exposing New Zealand participants to stuffed animals iconic of Australia prompted shifts in their subsequent vowel identification processes, with women moving towards and men away from an Australian-like vowel norm (Hay and Drager, 2010).”

“For example, listeners have been found to adjust their speech recognition based on a talker’s inferred regional origin (Hay & Drager, 2010; Niedzielski, 1999), gender (Johnson, Strand, & D’Imperio, 1999; Strand, 1999), age (Walker & Hay, 2011), and individual identity (Mitchel, Gerfen, & Weiss,…”

“Fourth, expectations can modulate speech perception, such as how many talkers are heard (Magnuson & Nusbaum, 2007) or which regional dialect a talker has (Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“This kind of more generalised geo-cultural bias has previously been found in the perception of synthesized speech, in which context was manipulated by the presence of different stuffed toys in the experimental room (Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“…based on socially-meaningful linguistic experience indeed influence participants’ perceptual behavior (see, e.g., Thomas (2002) or Hay and Drager (2010) for reviews), though most sociolinguistic research has focused either on production (e.g., Labov, 1994, 2001) or perception without…”

“…linguistic input (e.g., Dahan & Tanenhaus 2004; Kukona et al. 2011), including information external to the linguistic system, such as visually conveyed social information (Hay & Drager 2010; Staum Casasanto 2008) and high-level information about a speaker’s linguistic ability (Arnold et al. 2007).”

“Such a question has become especially relevant, as a variety of studies have recently illuminated the central role of social information in different areas of language processing (Casasanto, 2008; D'Onofrio, 2015; Hay, 2009; Squires, 2013).”

“…is influenced by global knowledge about the speaker (Kraljic, Brennan, & Samuel, 2008), and information in the environment that is completely unrelated to the speech stimuli (e.g., the presence of a stuffed toy in the room) has also been shown to influence speech perception (Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“…speaker, or the social prime, can be presented explicitly, in writing (Niedzielski 1999; Strand 1999) or photographs (Johnson et al. 1999; Hay et al. 2006), or implicitly, via cues in the speech signal itself (Drager 2011) or placement of a cue in the experimental environment (Hay & Drager 2010).”

“Within sociolinguistics, the work of Hay and Drager (2010) and Scobbie (personal communication) has underscored the important implications of even very subtle primes, by demonstrating that having a toy ‘accidentally’ fall out of a closet or having a particular soccer pennant pinned to the wall can…”

“…of sociolinguistics (e.g., Clopper et al., 2005; Labov et al., 2005) with the behavioral, experimental aspects (e.g., Clopper & Pisoni, 2006; Hay & Drager, 2010) in order to test hypotheses about how listeners pick up on and use socially-conditioned linguistic variation to make…”

“Both of these instances suggest that a number of respondents had been ‘primed’ (cf. Niedzielski 1999, Hay & Drager 2010, D’Onofrio 2015) to react in a particular fashion by the task instructions and their previous behavior.”

“…results have been replicated with different social priming mechanisms and different linguistic variables; social priming affects linguistic perception of the /ɪ/ vowel by New Zealanders (Hay, Nolan, & Drager, 2006) and encourages classification into a primed social category (Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“Thus, the local (i.e., regional) context may have the strongest impact on processing when the local dialect is also relatively standard or when it is not superseded by a smaller, local university context (see also Hay & Drager, 2010; Walker, 2014).”

“On the other hand, research shows that multiple sources of environmental information, such as sociolinguistic expectations and physical location (Hay & Drager, 2010; Hay, Podlubny, Drager, & McAuliffe, 2017), may interact with speech processing routines.”

“…(2009) showed that participants’ expectations about the accents to be heard (based on experimental instructions) affected their response times, while Hay and Drager (2010) demonstrated that even when an experimenter simply attracts participants’ attention in an incidental manner to a toy kangaroo,…”

“Previous studies have shown that the way in which listeners processes phonemic information is sensitive to the perceived accent of a speaker (Hay et al., 2006a,b; Hay and Drager, 2010).”

“Individuals can also shift their categories of speech sounds based on cues of the broad cultural context, even if these cues are only peripherally present (Hay and Drager, 2010).”

“Subsequent work by Jen Hay and colleagues (Hay & Drager, 2010; Hay, Nolan, & Drager, 2006) complicates Niedzielski’s conclusions about the relationship between impression formation and explicitly accessed ideologies.”

“…body of research shows that listeners’ perception is influenced by their beliefs about the individual and social identity (e.g., gender, age, social class, regional variety) of the speaker (see, among others, Niedzielski, 1999; Strand, 1999; Hay et al., 2006; Hay and Drager, 2010; Drager, 2011).”

“For example, adults’ linguistic perception can be primed by regional dialect information (e.g., Hay & Drager, 2010; Niedzielski, 1999).”

“It has previously been reported that listeners’ dialects as well as their associations with the dialect they are coding can have a significant influence on their perception of speech (cf. Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“…to the tasks, participants were exposed to written labels of dialectal regions (Australia or New Zealand) at the top of the response sheet in Hay et al. (2006a), and stuffed-toy kangaroos and koalas (associated with Australia) or toy kiwis (associated with New Zealand) in Hay and Drager (2010).”

“This is consistent with the growing body of evidence showing that listeners are sensitive to real-world cues such as information about the speaker or other properties of the discourse context (Hay & Drager, 2010; Kraljic & Samuel, 2005; Massaro, 1998; Staum Casasanto, 2008).”

“It has now been robustly shown that social properties of individual speakers matter to speech perception (e.g. Hay & Drager 2010; Drager 2011; McGowan 2015), but many other elements of context remain to be investigated (though see Hay et al. 2017), and much more work is needed on sentence…”

“Even expectations about a talker’s gender (Johnson et al. 1999) or regional background (Hay and Drager 2010) can change the way that listeners parse the phonetic signal into phonological categories.”

“…stimuli (Carden, Levitt, Jusczyk, & Walley, 1981), and even presenting stuffed animals that are associated with certain dialects (e.g. kangaroos for Australian dialects) leads listeners to identify speech tokens relative to how they expect talkers of that dialect to speak (Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“…vowel system; Hay et al., 2006), when a stuffed animal strongly associated with either Australia or New Zealand was displayed in the experiment room (Hay & Drager, 2010), and when listeners were provided with images of talkers of different ages/social classes that were associated with…”

“In some cases, the activation of a specific social category using verbal labels or symbolic elements was enough to shift the listeners’ phonetic categories (Niedzielski, 1999; Hay and Drager, 2010).”

“In their study of the perception of New Zealand and Australian English vowels, Hay and Drager (2010), for instance, presented all stimuli (both those typical of New Zealand and Australian English) in both the New Zealand and Australian conditions of their study.”

“Moreover, this priming can be either very explicit (as in studies that use pictures to prime social categories) or implicit, as in Hay and Drager (2010).”

“In a subsequent study, Hay and Drager (2010) found that the mere presence of a stuffed toy kangaroo (indicating Australia) or kiwi (indicating New Zealand) could influence listeners’ responses.”

“It seems likely that the effect of topic=priming on perception is similarly problematic for purely experiential accounts: in perception studies we also see inaccurate perceptual adaptation (Niedzielski, 1999, 2010), and more robust adaptation to salient variables (Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“Hay and Drager (2010) show that phonetic category boundaries are impacted by subtle priming of the Australian versus New Zealand dialects.”

“Hay and Drager (2010) observe a gender difference in whether New Zealand participants shift towards or away from Australian English when primed with stuffed kangaroo and koala toys, such that women shift towards Australian English, but men, relatively, shift more towards New Zealand English.”

“Work on language stereotypes, attitudes (Johnson et al., 1999; Niedzielski, 1999; Hay and Drager, 2010; Jannedy and Weirich, 2014), and person perception (Scherer, 1972; Schirmer, 2019) has shown that it is possible to put speakers in mind-sets in which to perceive speech.”

“…did not address socio-indexical traits like ethnicity that fall outside the superiority-versussocial-attractiveness rubric, but which nevertheless form an important part of listeners’ awareness of language variation (e.g., Hay & Drager, 2010; Koops, Gentry, & Pantos, 2008; Niedzielski, 1999).”

“ready comparison to the primes used by Hay & Drager (2010) [1].”

“In fact, the authors find that the expected regional priming effect is actually weaker in their study than the one found in previous studies (cf. Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“Similar interactions between condition and gender have been found in other research (Hay, Nolan & Drager 2006; Hay & Drager 2010; Drager 2011).”