Programm 78. Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft

A growing body of research suggests that social factors such as a speaker’s ethnicity, gender, or linguistic background influence how speech is perceived. Social priming describes how activating social expectations shapes judgments of intelligibility, accentedness, and competence. The present study investigated social priming in foreign-accent perception by examining whether viewing a South-East Asian versus a Caucasian face affects accentedness ratings of Cantonese-accented and native German. In addition, it explored how listeners’ attitudes toward accents, migration, and open-mindedness contributed to these judgments, and whether reaction times reveal processing differences when social expectations are matched or mismatched.

Sixty-five monolingually raised German L1 speakers (aged 45–69) completed an accentedness rating task. Participants were primed with either a South-East Asian or Caucasian face, followed by Cantonese-accented or native German speech. They also filled in a questionnaire assessing attitudes towards accents and migration, and their open-mindedness. Results showed that speech was rated as more foreign-accented when paired with a South-East Asian face compared to a Caucasian face, regardless of whether the speech was Cantonese-accented or native German. No such effect was observed when the speech originated from monolingual German L1 speakers. Social priming effects were further modulated by listeners’ attitudes: Participants who believed that accent strength and type are predictive of a person’s character and who held more negative views of accents gave higher foreign-accent ratings overall. In contrast, attitudes towards migration did not affect accent ratings. Reaction time analyses revealed slower responses when face and audio were mismatched compared to when no face was shown. Across all conditions, Cantonese-accented speech elicited slower reaction times than native German speech. These findings indicate that visual social information in the form of faces influences how listeners perceive accentedness, supporting bias-based and raciolinguistic accounts of speech perception rather than exemplar-based models that predict facilitation from matched expectations. The study highlights the role of listeners' social biases in shaping judgments of non-native speech, with broader implications for understanding the realities of non-native speakers.

Keywords: Social priming, foreign accent perception, Cantonese accent, German, listener attitudes

Info

Tag: 13.11.2025
Anfangszeit: 16:30
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: M17.11
Track: Soziolinguistik
Sprache: en

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