Perception in Black and White: Effects of Intonational Variables and Filtering Conditions on Sociolinguistic Judgments With Implications for ASR

This study tests the effects of intonational contours and filtering conditions on listener judgments of ethnicity to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding on how prosody influences these judgments, with implications for austomatic speech recognition systems as well as speech synthesis. In a perceptual experiment, 40 American English listeners heard phrase-long clips which were controlled for pitch accent type and focus marking. Each clip contained either two H* (high) or two L+H* (low high) pitch accents and a L-L% (falling) boundary tone, and had also previously been labelled for broad or narrow focus. Listeners rated clips in two tasks, one with unmodified stimuli and one with stimuli lowpass filtered at 400 Hz, and were asked to judge whether the speaker was “Black” or “White”. In the filtered condition, tokens with the L+H* pitch accent were more likely to be rated as “Black”, with an interaction such that broad focus enhanced this pattern, supporting earlier findings that listeners may perceive African American Language as having more variation in possible pitch accent meanings. In the unfiltered condition, tokens with the L+H* pitch accent were less likely to be rated as Black, with no effect of focus, likely due to the fact that listeners relied more heavily on available segmental information in this condition. These results enhance our understanding of cues listeners rely on in making social judgments about speakers, especially in ethnic identification and linguistic profiling, by highlighting perceptual differences due to listening environment as well as predicted meaning of specific intonational contours. They also contribute to our understanding of the role of how human listeners interpret meaning within a holistic context, which has implications for the construction of computational systems designed to replicate the properties of natural language. In particular, they have important applicability to speech synthesis and speech recognition programs, which are often limited in their capacities due to the fact that they do not make such holistic sociolinguistic considerations of the meanings of input or output speech.

Intonation and Referee Design Phenomena in the Narrative Speech of Black/Biracial Men

This study examines how men with one Black parent and one white parent variably construct their racial identities through both linguistic practice and explicit testimonials, with a specific focus on how this construction is realized in narratives about law enforcement. The data consist of interviews with five young men, aged 18-32, in Washington, D.C., and the analysis compares use of intonational phenomena associated with African American Language (AAL) in response to questions about aspects of their racial identities. Declarative intonational phrases from responses to questions were MAE-ToBi annotated and analyzed for use of intonational features subject to racialized stylistic variation, including use of L+H* versus H*, focus marking, and peak delay interval length. Results of multiple regression models indicate speakers avoid intonational features associated with AAL in police narratives, especially L+H* pitch accents with broad focus marking and longer peak delay intervals. These findings illuminate an important aspect of the relationship between linguistic performance and identity: both racial and linguistic identities are subject to topic and audience/referee-conditioned variation and individuals can use specific intonational variables to align themselves within specific audience and topic-influenced constraints. In the context of police narratives, avoidance of salient features of AAL intonation can serve as linguistic respectability politics; these speakers have motivation to employ linguistic behavior that distances them from the most societally and physically precarious implications of their identities.