The role of intergroup attitudes in speech perception

This thesis pursued the overall hypothesis that listeners use abstract information whenever it is available in perceiving speech. It also attempted to evaluate the role of socio-indexical information in speech perception and, in particular, the possibility of further abstractions over abstract social categories. These abstract social categories can be abstracted over two sources of socio-indexical information: (1) knowledge and/or feelings from direct speech exposure; and (2) beliefs and/or feelings from indirect sources about speech. Abstractions of both types were predicted to have a relationship with listeners’ perception of speech, sometimes interacting with each other in a complex manner. These predictions were made within the episodic approach and the hybrid approach to speech perception (including the Bayesian framework), tested over the course of three perception experiments with Australia-born listeners (reported in Chapters 2, 3, and 4), and had implications for speech perception theories. In addition to theoretical advances, the thesis also proposes several methodological advances in the areas of experimentation and data analysis, such as the attempt to quantify formant variability while taking the magnitude of formant means into account, the quantification of stereotypical expectations via Bayesian formalism, the quantification of prejudice, and the use of Australian-accented English and Vietnamese-accented English as speech stimuli in the vowel perception experiments to serve different purposes. Overall, the results in this thesis suggest that high-level abstractions over social categories are possible, and that Bayesian principles need to be integrated into the hybrid approach to explain all possible speech perception scenarios, some of which involves highly abstract social factors