Speech Science Forum - Ruohan Guo

Human communication involves not only the transmission of linguistic content but also the exchange of social information. Previous studies have shown that listeners form expectations about the speech they hear on the basis of social cues presented outside the speech stream, ranging from a talker’s apparent ethnicity (Babel & Russell, 2015) to incidental objects associated with a particular accent region (Hay & Drager, 2010). These experience-driven sociolinguistic expectations can in turn affect listeners’ behaviour in speech processing tasks. However, this line of research has focused primarily on L1 English speakers in relatively restricted settings, especially North America. Much less is known about whether, and how, these processes operate in other sociolinguistic contexts, and how they unfold for other listener and speaker populations, including second-language learners. In this SSF talk, I will present part of my PhD research examining how different kinds of social information are integrated into the processing of speech in a British context.