Stuffed toys and speech perception

“Other research, largely based in speech perception, has shown non-linguistic influences on language processing, ranging from talkerspecific effects (McLennan & Luce, 2005; Nygaard & Pisoni, 1998) to social stereotype effects (Hay & Drager, 2010; Hay, Warren, & Drager, 2006; Niedzielski, 1999).”

“…about where a speaker is from is manipulated, listeners familiar with the region and accent perceive the same recorded vowel productions differently depending on the social or dialect group they believe the speaker to be a part of (Hay et al., 2006; Hay & Drager, 2010; Niedzielski, 1999).”

“Niedzielski (1999), for example, demonstrates that listeners’ classifications of different variants of the onset of the mouth diphthong in English depend on whether listeners were primed to believe the speaker was Canadian or American (see also Hay & Drager 2010).”

“(cf. Hay and Drager, 2010, see Figure 1).”

“On the other hand, we know a lot about the ways in which the context is indexed in linguistic conventions and how this contributes to language variation and change (see e.g. Niedzielski 1999; Hay and Drager 2010; Bucholtz 1999).”

“…not only by the speakers’ own productions as well as by their linguistic experience, but also by more general factors like the items, contexts, social information, exposure to concepts, and so on, presented in the task (Hay & Drager, 2010; Hay, Nolan, & Drager, 2006; Hay, Warren, et al., 2006).”

“Jannedy and Weirich take up this issue through their demonstration that perceptual categorizations in speech can be altered by exposure to visual primes (see also, e.g., Hay and Drager [2010] for a similar demonstration with respect to Australian/New Zealand English differences).”

“…were sounds that—like the trills in the present case—are not represented as phonologically distinct categories in participants’ phonological grammar, but belong to regional accents, or are merged with another category in participants’ own use (e.g., Hay and Drager, 2010; Koops et al., 2008).”

“Listeners from different backgrounds and with different linguistic experiences often interpret the same signal differently and their evaluation of any given speech-signal is context-dependent [12,13].”

“Even seeing stuffed animals associated with different speaker groups (e.g. a kiwi cueing a New Zealand dialect) can shape speech perception (Hay & Drager 2010).”

“…by the paradigm (e.g., Simonet 2014)) or imagined (i.e., visible or non-visible sociolinguistic cues (e.g., Babel and Russell 2015)), or is present in the physical environment that immediately surrounds participants (i.e., region-specific cues in the experimental setting (Hay and Drager 2010)).”

“Crucially, in Hay and Drager (2010) these cues were implicit, in that they were not interpretable as characteristics of the speaker who produced the tokens, suggesting that the cues were acting on the perceptual system in a way that is both low-level and indirect, perhaps through the differential…”

“Hay et al., 2006; Hay and Drager, 2010; Drager, 2010). These expectations are based on prior experience with that language variety. Similarly, listeners who believe they are listening to a speaker of a certain age or social class, adapt their perception to their expectations regarding the sociolectdwhether or not this…”

“Relatedly, speech perception can be influenced by a speaker’s social background, including their expected dialect area (Niedzielski, 1999), where cues to a particular accent or region can influence the perception of phonemes (Hay et al., 2006; Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“Speech researchers should therefore keep in mind that, even in relatively low-level speech perception experiments, participants interpret the stimuli within a broader linguistic context in which the speaker is viewed as a social agent (Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“(For interesting views on problems in the methodology, see Hay and Drager (2010).)”

“Recall that previous research has shown that the perception of variables can be a ff ected by social information about the speaker (Hay and Drager 2010; Hay et al. 2006a, 2006b; Koops et al. 2008; Niedzielski 1999; Strand 1999).”

“More generally, a growing literature targets the extent to which perceived social group membership affects language comprehension, including in phonological and syntactic processing (Drager, 2010a,b; Staum Casasanto, 2008; Hay et al., 2006; Hanuĺıková et al., 2012; Hay and Drager, 2010; Warren, 2017).”

“…2018), morphosyntactic function (Plag et al., 2015; Lõo et al., 2023), information load (Bell et al., 2003; Aylett and Turk, 2004; Van Son and Pols, 2003), the many social factors studied in sociolinguistics (see, e.g., Hay and Drager, 2010), and effects of alcohol (Pisoni and Martin, 1989).”

“…input (e.g. Davis et al., 2005; Kraljic and Samuel, 2005, 2007; Maye et al., 2008; Vroomen et al., 2007) and listener expectations about that input (e.g. Babel, 2012; Clopper, 2014; Hay and Drager, 2010; Hay et al., 2006; Kraljic and Samuel, 2005; Kraljic et al., 2008; Magnuson and Nusbaum, 2007).”

“This prediction, too, is borne out in empirical data (Hay & Drager, 2010; gender, Johnson, Strand, & D’Imperio, 1999; dialect, Niedzielski, 1999).”

“The external activation of stereotyped dialect categories, through either explicit place labels or implicit cultural associations, has similarly been shown to affect performance in vowel perception tasks (Hay and Drager, 2010; Hay et al., 2006; Niedzielski, 1999).”

“Experimental evidence shows that even subtle alterations to a stuffed toy presented to human subjects can shift their perception of vowel sounds [39].”

“…is often bi-directional: comprehenders not only infer social information from the linguistic signal; they also adjust their perception of the linguistic signal depending on what information is available (Niedzielski 1999, Hay & Drager 2010, Babel 2012, Drager 2015, D’Onofrio 2015, 2018, 2019).”

“In addition, perception has been found to be biased by beliefs held by participants, including laboratory-induced beliefs about the speakers’ origin (e.g., Hay & Drager, 2010; Niedzielski, 1999).”

“…sheet, or drawing the listener’s attention to a stuffed animal representing a country, have proven sufficient to bias listeners in their perception of vowel variants (e.g., Hay & Drager, 2010; Hay, Nolan, & Drager, 2006; Niedzielski, 1999; although see Walker, Szakay, & Cox (2019) as well).”

“…keep track of different levels of speaker information – including both demographic features (e.g., Strand 1999; Niedzielski 1999; Hay et al. 2006; Hay 2009; Babel 2012; Drager 2015; Staum Casasanto 2008; Sumner et al. 2014) As to what specific motivation drives the observed interplay between…”

“Even seeing stuffed animals associated with different speaker groups (e.g. a kiwi cueing a New Zealand dialect) can shape speech perception (Hay & Drager 2010).”

“Speech perception is heavily influenced by social factors that prompt assumptions about standard language, prestige, and social expectations of language production (Hay and Drager 2010; Kutlu 2020; Rubin 1992).”

“Salience and its relationship to whether or not D1 shifts towards D2 may also be conditioned by the speaker’s attitude towards the dialect that is being acquired (Niedzielski 1999 for related perception studies, Walker 2014; see also Hay & Drager 2010, Jannedy & Weirich 2014). d.”

“Linking the pronunciation of a feature with the environment in which it is uttered—including topic of conversation—means that particular variants may associate more readily with certain situations (Goldinger, 1997; Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“Early work in this paradigm found evidence for sociolinguistic priming effects (Johnson et al. 1999; Niedzielski 1999; Hay et al. 2006a, 2006b, 2009; Hay & Drager 2010; Drager 2011), although some recent studies have failed to replicate these findings (Squires 2013; Lawrence 2015; Juskan 2016;…”

“…sociolinguistiques : voix évoquant un genre, photo mettant en évidence le groupe social du locuteur, évocation incidente d’une aire géographique par un emblème (Niedzielski, 1999 ; Johnson et al., 1999 ; Hay et al., 2006a, 2006b ; Hay & Drager, 2010 ; Staum Casasanto, 2009 ; Squires, 2011).”

“…sociolinguistique (Campbell-Kibler, 2010; Labov et alii., 2011; Loudermilk et alii., 2011), des expérimentations fondées sur des méthodes d’amorçage (Hay & Drager, 2010; Squires, 2011; Staum Casasanto, 2009) permettraient de saisir, à différents âges, le degré d’automaticité et d’implicite des…”

“Hay & Drager (2010) demonstrate that phonetic decisions can even be influenced by non-linguistic experiences such as seeing national symbols.”

“…shown that individuals can exhibit control over their language practices even if they are unaware that they are doing so, whether they are motivated by the social identity of their interlocutors (Bell, 1984) or by contextual information that triggers unconscious associations (Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“Furthermore, visual information does not need to include the faces of the speakers to influence speech perception (Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“In speech perception research, modifying listener expectations about talker characteristics such as dialect, even in subtle ways, can have important consequences for speech perception (e.g., Hay & Drager, 2010).”

“This fact reinforces the findings of Strand & Johnson (1996), Niedzielski (1999), Hay et al. (2006), Hay & Drager (2010), and Munson (2011) about how stereotypes may distort phonetic perception.”

“Towhat extent should we control for or document the identity of the interviewer, setting, and visual cues like those shown to be relevant in Hay & Drager (2010).”

“…studies investigating the construction of social meaning of language and how fine phonetic detail influence social categorisation in perception (e.g. Thomas et al., 2010) or, vice versa, how social detail influences phonetic perception (e.g. Hay and Drager, 2010) have been particularly prominent.”

“It is well established that listeners do learn to perceive new language varieties (Fox, 1974; Hay et al., 2010; Sumner, 2011), and that they use world knowledge and their social beliefs about speakers to do so (Niedzielski, 1999; Johnson et al., 1999; Hay and Drager, 2010).”

“(See also Hay & Drager 2010, Hay, Nolan & Drager 2006 and Hay, Warren & Drager 2006 inter alia).”

“Phonological generalization over phonetic input is dependent on associative information: perceptual divergence is found within the confines of a single large urban area [2,3,4].”

“Recordings were made under identical conditions and analyzed in Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2023) by two trained raters following sociophonetic protocols (Foulkes and Docherty, 2006; Hay and Drager, 2010).”

“Drawing on prior studies that incorporate extralinguistic cues in experimental materials (e.g., Callesano & Carter, 2019; Carter & Callesano, 2018; Hay & Drager, 2010; Niedzielski, 1999), ostensible source labels were included for half of both the grammatical and ungrammatical items.”

“Linguistic expectations concerning speaker identity are shaped by both auditory (e.g., Niedzielski, 1999) and visual cues (e.g., Hay & Drager 2010).”

“With respect to non-linguistic variables, for example, experiments exposing New Zealand English speakers to symbols associated with Australia (i.e., stu ff ed toy kangaroos) or New Zealand (i.e., stu ff ed toy kiwi birds) showed that their vowel perception shifted accordingly (Hay and Drager 2010).”

“…which emphasize that occupational complexity can enhance efficiency, attentional control, and flexible cognitive strategies in later life [33–35] and with research suggesting that listener experience and expertise shape perceptual and evaluative norms independently of objective performance [18,39].”

“This type of label-based perceptual shift has since been replicated across speaker attributes such as gender, region, and ethnicity (Hay and Drager 2010; Strand and Johnson 1996), supporting the view that dialectal variation may be lexically speci fi ed and retrieved via abstract social labels.”

“Listeners use social information about speakers ’ regional origin in perception, both when categorizing speech sounds (Niedzielski, 1999; Hay & Drager, 2010) and when socially evaluating speakers (Campbell-Kibler, 2009, 2011; Carmichael, 2016, 2018).”

“It is well known that speech perception is influenced by social characteristics (Niedzielski 1999, Hay et al. 2006, Hay & Drager 2010), both the social characteristics of a listener and perceived characteristics of a speaker (Hay et al. 2006).”

“It has even been shown that social attitudes may go so far as to shape perception of a particular variant (Drager, 2005; Hay & Drager, 2010; Niedzielski, 1999).”

“Finally, Walker et al. (2019) replicated the Hay and Drager (2010) study in an Australian context, employing stuffed animals to prime listener responses.”