The power of powerless speech: The effects of speech style and task interdependence on status conferral

Two studies examine the effects of speech styles and task interdependence on status conferral judgments. In both studies, participants were exposed to an individual who used either a powerful or powerless speech style in a low or high task interdependence group, and made judgments about the amount of status to confer to the individual. When task interdependence was low, participants conferred more status to powerful speakers, whereas when interdependence was high, participants conferred more status to powerless speakers. Furthermore, Study 2 demonstrated that speech styles influenced trait inferences about the speaker (agency and communality), but these traits were weighted differently in status conferral judgments across groups. These findings provide insight into both the relationship between observed behaviors and status positions and the decision process underlying status conferral judgments.     

Perception of spasmodic dysphonia speech in background noise

The purpose of this investigation was to judge whether the Lombard effect, a characteristic change in the acoustical properties of speech produced in noise, existed in adductor spasmodic dysphonia speech, and if so, whether the effect added to or detracted from speaker intelligibility. Intelligibility, as described by Duffy, is the extent to which the acoustic signal produced by a speaker is understood by a listener based on the auditory signal alone. Four speakers with adductor spasmodic dysphonia provided speech samples consisting of low probability sentences from the Speech Perception in Noise test to use as stimuli. The speakers were first tape-recorded as they read the sentences in a quiet speaking condition and were later tape-recorded as they read the same sentences while exposed to background noise. The listeners used as subjects in this study were 50 undergraduate university students. The results of the statistical analysis indicated a significant difference between the intelligibility of the speech recorded in the quiet versus noise conditions (F(1,49) = 57.80, p < or = .001). It was concluded that a deleterious Lombard effect existed for the adductor spasmodic dysphonia speaker group, with the premise that the activation of a Lombard effect in such patients may detract from their overall speech intelligibility.     

Accusers Lie and Other Myths: Rape Myth Acceptance Predicts Judgments Made About Accusers and Accused Perpetrators in a Rape Case

Previous research results have yielded a consistent link between rape myth acceptance and sexual assault victim blaming: Individuals reporting higher levels of rape myth acceptance also report higher levels of victim blaming. In four studies we explored whether the presentation of rape-myth confirming information or rape-myth debunking information might moderate these tendencies. In these studies, U.S. undergraduates (97 in Study 1, 84 in Study 2, 98 in Study 3, and 116 in Study 4) read scenarios of a heterosexual sexual assault case and were randomly assigned to a control condition, a rape myth confirmation condition, or a rape myth debunking condition; they also reported the extent to which they endorsed or accepted rape myths. Rape myth acceptance robustly correlated with judgments made about accusers and accused rapists regardless whether the accuser/accused pairing was female/male (Studies 1 and 2) or male/female (Studies 3 and 4). For example, those who most strongly endorsed rape myths were also likely to disbelieve accusers. There were few instances indicating that the presentation of rape myth confirming information or rape myth debunking information moderated these effects. This lack of moderation occurred regardless of whether the information came from trial lawyers or from expert witnesses in the case. The relative impotence of the information presentations could be due to several factors (e.g., entrenched nature of rape myth acceptance, psychological reactance, timing and strength of manipulation), and we suggest ideas for how to overcome this relative impotence in future research.

     

The resilience of gesture in talk: gesture in blind speakers and listeners

Spontaneous gesture frequently accompanies speech. The question is why. In these studies, we tested two non‐mutually exclusive possibilities. First, speakers may gesture simply because they see others gesture and learn from this model to move their hands as they talk. We tested this hypothesis by examining spontaneous communication in congenitally blind children and adolescents. Second, speakers may gesture because they recognize that gestures can be useful to the listener. We tested this hypothesis by examining whether speakers gesture even when communicating with a blind listener who is unable to profit from the information that the hands convey. We found that congenitally blind speakers, who had never seen gestures, nevertheless gestured as they spoke, conveying the same information and producing the same range of gesture forms as sighted speakers. Moreover, blind speakers gestured even when interacting with another blind individual who could not have benefited from the information contained in those gestures. These findings underscore the robustness of gesture in talk and suggest that the gestures that co‐occur with speech may serve a function for the speaker as well as for the listener.     

The role of temporal speech cues in facilitating the fluency of adults who stutter

PurposeAdults who stutter speak more fluently during choral speech contexts than they do during solo speech contexts. The underlying mechanisms for this effect remain unclear, however. In this study, we examined the extent to which the choral speech effect depended on presentation of intact temporal speech cues. We also examined whether speakers who stutter followed choral signals more closely than typical speakers did.Method8 adults who stuttered and 8 adults who did not stutter read 60 sentences aloud during a solo speaking condition and three choral speaking conditions (240 total sentences), two of which featured either temporally altered or indeterminate word duration patterns. Effects of these manipulations on speech fluency, rate, and temporal entrainment with the choral speech signal were assessed.ResultsAdults who stutter spoke more fluently in all choral speaking conditions than they did when speaking solo. They also spoke slower and exhibited closer temporal entrainment with the choral signal during the mid- to late-stages of sentence production than the adults who did not stutter. Both groups entrained more closely with unaltered choral signals than they did with altered choral signals.ConclusionsFindings suggest that adults who stutter make greater use of speech-related information in choral signals when talking than adults with typical fluency do. The presence of fluency facilitation during temporally altered choral speech and conversation babble, however, suggests that temporal/gestural cueing alone cannot account for fluency facilitation in speakers who stutter. Other potential fluency enhancing mechanisms are discussed.Educational Objectives: The reader will be able to (a) summarize competing views on stuttering as a speech timing disorder, (b) describe the extent to which adults who stutter depend on an accurate rendering of temporal information in order to benefit from choral speech, and (c) discuss possible explanations for fluency facilitation in the presence of inaccurate or indeterminate temporal cues.     

When Do Speakers Use Gestures to Specify Who Does What to Whom? The Role of Language Proficiency and Type of Gestures in Narratives

Previous research has found that iconic gestures (i.e., gestures that depict the actions, motions or shapes of entities) identify referents that are also lexically specified in the co-occurring speech produced by proficient speakers. This study examines whether concrete deictic gestures (i.e., gestures that point to physical entities) bear a different kind of relation to speech, and whether this relation is influenced by the language proficiency of the speakers. Two groups of speakers who had different levels of English proficiency were asked to retell a story in English. Their speech and gestures were transcribed and coded. Our findings showed that proficient speakers produced concrete deictic gestures for referents that were not specified in speech, and iconic gestures for referents that were specified in speech, suggesting that these two types of gestures bear different kinds of semantic relations with speech. In contrast, less proficient speakers produced concrete deictic gestures and iconic gestures whether or not referents were lexically specified in speech. Thus, both type of gesture and proficiency of speaker need to be considered when accounting for how gesture and speech are used in a narrative context.     

Hearing a face: cross-modal speaker matching using isolated visible speech

An experiment was performed to test whether cross-modal speaker matches could be made using isolated visible speech movement information. Visible speech movements were isolated using a point-light technique. In five conditions, subjects were asked to match a voice to one of two (unimodal) speaking point-light faces on the basis of speaker identity. Two of these conditions were designed to maintain the idiosyncratic speech dynamics of the speakers, whereas three of the conditions deleted or distorted the dynamics in various ways. Some of these conditions also equated video frames across dynamically correct and distorted movements. The results revealed generally better matching performance in the conditions that maintained the correct speech dynamics than in those conditions that did not, despite containing exactly the same video frames. The results suggest that visible speech movements themselves can support cross-modal speaker matching.     

Strength of British English accents in altered listening conditions

This work is concerned with the processing or representational level at which accent forms learned early in life can change and with whether alteration to a speaker's auditory environment can elicit an original accent. In Experiment 1, recordings were made of an equal number of (1) speakers living in the home counties (HC) of Britain (around the London conurbation) who claimed to have retained the accent of the region that they originally had come from, (2) speakers who stated that they had lost their regional accent and acquired an HC accent, and (3) native HC speakers. They read two texts in a normal listening environment. Listeners rated the similarity in accent between each of these texts and all the other texts. The results showed that in the normal listening conditions, the speakers who had lost their accent were rated as being more similar to HC English speakers than to those speakers from the same region who had retained their accent. In Experiment 2, recordings of the same speakers under frequency-shifted and delayed auditory feedback, as well as the normal listening conditions used earlier, were rated in order to see whether the manipulations of listening environment would elicit the speaker's original accent. Listeners rated similarity of accent in a sample of speech recorded under normal listening against a sample read by another speaker in one of the altered listening conditions. When listening condition was altered, the speakers who had lost their original accent were rated as more similar to those who had retained their accent. It is concluded that accent differences can be elicited by altering listening environment because the speech systems of speakers who have lost their accent are more vulnerable than those of speakers who have not changed their original accent.     

Consistency between verbal and non-verbal affective cues: a clue to speaker credibility

Listeners are exposed to inconsistencies in communication; for example, when speakers’ words (i.e. verbal) are discrepant with their demonstrated emotions (i.e. non-verbal). Such inconsistencies introduce ambiguity, which may render a speaker to be a less credible source of information. Two experiments examined whether children make credibility discriminations based on the consistency of speakers’ affect cues. In Experiment 1, school-age children (7- to 8-year-olds) preferred to solicit information from consistent speakers (e.g. those who provided a negative statement with negative affect), over novel speakers, to a greater extent than they preferred to solicit information from inconsistent speakers (e.g. those who provided a negative statement with positive affect) over novel speakers. Preschoolers (4- to 5-year-olds) did not demonstrate this preference. Experiment 2 showed that school-age children's ratings of speakers were influenced by speakers’ affect consistency when the attribute being judged was related to information acquisition (speakers’ believability, “weird” speech), but not general characteristics (speakers’ friendliness, likeability). Together, findings suggest that school-age children are sensitive to, and use, the congruency of affect cues to determine whether individuals are credible sources of information.     

Talking to children, foreigners, and retarded adults

Speech addressed to different categories of listeners was examined in a study in which undergraduate women taught a block design task to either a 6-year-old child, a retarded adult, a peer who spoke English as a second language (foreigner), or a peer who was an unimpaired native speaker of English. The speech addressed to children differed from the speech addressed to native adults along every major dimension that emerged in this study: It was clearer, simpler, and more attention maintaining, and it included longer pauses. Speech addressed to retarded adults was similar in numerous ways to the speech addressed to 6-year-olds; in some ways (e.g., repetitiveness), it was even more babyish. However, speech to the retarded adults did differ in timing from the other styles of speaking in that it included fewer and somewhat shorter pauses. Speech addressed to foreigners was more repetitive than speech addressed to native speakers, but in all other ways it was very similar. There was some evidence that speakers fine-tuned their communications to the level of cognitive and linguistic sophistication of their particular listener; for example, speakers addressing the more sophisticated foreigners (relative to those addressing the less sophisticated foreigners) used speech that included fewer devices for clarifying, simplifying, and maintaining the listeners' attention. We discuss the hypothesis that baby talk (the speech addressed to children) is a prototypical special speech register from which other special registers are derived.     

Strength of German accent under altered auditory feedback.

Borden's (1979, 1980) hypothesis that speakers with vulnerable speech systems rely more heavily on feedback monitoring than do speakers with less vulnerable systems was investigated. The second language (L2) of a speaker is vulnerable, in comparison with the native language, so alteration to feedback should have a detrimental effect on it, according to this hypothesis. Here, we specifically examined whether altered auditory feedback has an effect on accent strength when speakers speak L2. There were three stages in the experiment. First, 6 German speakers who were fluent in English (their L2) were recorded under six conditions--normal listening, amplified voice level, voice shifted in frequency, delayed auditory feedback, and slowed and accelerated speech rate conditions. Second, judges were trained to rate accent strength. Training was assessed by whether it was successful in separating German speakers speaking English from native English speakers, also speaking English. In the final stage, the judges ranked recordings of each speaker from the first stage as to increasing strength of German accent. The results show that accents were more pronounced under frequency-shifted and delayed auditory feedback conditions than under normal or amplified feedback conditions. Control tests were done to ensure that listeners were judging accent, rather than fluency changes caused by altered auditory feedback. The findings are discussed in terms of Borden's hypothesis and other accounts about why altered auditory feedback disrupts speech control.     

Laterality differences in speaker and consonant identification in dichotic listening

Two dichotic listening experiments assess the lateralization of speaker identification in right-handed native English speakers. Stimuli were tokens of /ba/, /da/, /pa/, and /ta/ pronounced by two male and two female speakers. In Experiment 1, subjects identified either the two consonants in dichotic stimuli spoken by the same person, or identified two speakers in dichotic tokens of the same syllable. In Experiment 2 new subjects identified the two consonants or the two speakers in pairs in which both consonant and speaker distinguished the pair members. Both experiments yielded significant right-ear advantages for consonant identification and nonsignificant ear differences for speaker identification. Fewer errors were made for speaker judgments than for consonant judgments, and for speaker judgments for pairs in which the speakers were of the same sex than for pairs in which speaker sex differed. It is concluded that, as in vowel identification, neither hemisphere clearly dominates in dichotic speaker identification, perhaps because of minor information loss in the ipsilateral pathways.     

Blind Speakers Show Language‐Specific Patterns in Co‐Speech Gesture but Not Silent Gesture

Sighted speakers of different languages vary systematically in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech. These differences influence how semantic elements are organized in gesture, but only when those gestures are produced with speech (co‐speech gesture), not without speech (silent gesture). We ask whether the cross‐linguistic similarity in silent gesture is driven by the visuospatial structure of the event. We compared 40 congenitally blind adult native speakers of English or Turkish (20/language) to 80 sighted adult speakers (40/language; half with, half without blindfolds) as they described three‐dimensional motion scenes. We found an effect of language on co‐speech gesture, not on silent gesture—blind speakers of both languages organized their silent gestures as sighted speakers do. Humans may have a natural semantic organization that they impose on events when conveying them in gesture without language—an organization that relies on neither visuospatial cues nor language structure.     

Strength of German accent under altered auditory feedback

Borden’s (1979, 1980) hypothesis that speakers with vulnerable speech systems rely more heavily on feedback monitoring than do speakers with less vulnerable systems was investigated. The second language (L2) of a speaker is vulnerable, in comparison with the native language, so alteration to feedback should have a detrimental effect on it, according to this hypothesis. Here, we specifically examined whether altered auditory feedback has an effect on accent strength when speakers speak L2. There were three stages in the experiment. First, 6 German speakers who were fluent in English (their L2) were recorded under six conditions—normal listening, amplified voice level, voice shifted in frequency, delayed auditory feedback, and slowed and accelerated speech rate conditions. Second, judges were trained to rate accent strength. Training was assessed by whether it was successful in separating German speakers speaking English from native English speakers, also speaking English. In the final stage, the judges ranked recordings of each speaker from the first stage as to increasing strength of German accent. The results show that accents were more pronounced under frequency-shifted and delayed auditory feedback conditions than under normal or amplified feedback conditions. Control tests were done to ensure that listeners were judging accent, rather than fluency changes caused by altered auditory feedback. The findings are discussed in terms of Borden’s hypothesis and other accounts about why altered auditory feedback disrupts speech control.     

Traditional and Nontraditional Women's Attributions of Responsibility to Physically Resistive and Nonresistive Rape Victims1

This research examined the interactive effect of women observers' sex-role attitudes and a victim's use of physical resistance on perceptions of victim responsibility for a sexual assault. Women read one of two rape scenarios in which a victim either did or did not physically resist a rapist's attack and made judgments concerning victim responsibility. The observers were categorized as being either traditionally conservative or nontraditionally profeminist in their attitudes toward women and their roles in society. An analysis of responsibility judgments indicated that traditional women perceived a victim who resisted the attack as being more responsible for her own victimization than did nontraditional women, whereas nontraditional women assigned more responsibility to a victim who did not resist than did traditional women. These results are considered from a sex-role socialization perspective; the implications of these findings for legal and health care professionals are discussed.     

Professed impressions: What people say about others affects onlookers’ perceptions of speakers’ power and warmth

During a conversation, it is common for a speaker to describe a third-party that the listener does not know. These professed impressions not only shape the listener’s view of the third-party but also affect judgments of the speaker herself. We propose a previously unstudied consequence of professed impressions: judgments of the speaker’s power. In two studies, we find that listeners ascribe more power to speakers who profess impressions focusing on a third-party’s conscientiousness, compared to those focusing on agreeableness. We also replicate previous research showing that speakers saying positive things about third parties are seen as more agreeable than speakers saying negative things. In the second study, we demonstrate that conscientiousness-power effects are mediated by inferences about speakers’ task concerns and positivity-agreeableness effects are mediated by inferences about speakers’ other-enhancing concerns. Finally, we show that judgments of speaker status parallel judgments of agreeableness rather than of power, suggesting that perceivers use different processes to make inferences about status and power. These findings have implications for the literatures on person perception, power, and status.     

Punishing Individuals for Their Infirmities: Effects of Personal Responsibility, Just-World Beliefs, and In-Group/Out-Group Status

This research examined how derogation of cancer victims was moderated by (a) the perceived responsibility of the victim, (b) individual differences in just-world beliefs, and (c) whether the victim was an in-group versus out-group member. Participants formed an impression of an in-group or an out-group member who was known to have a terminal case of cancer. Half of the participants were informed that the target person was partially responsible for this medical condition, whereas the remaining participants were not given this information. Results showed that blaming judgments of high versus low responsibility targets were moderated by just-world beliefs, but this was only true when the person being judged was an out-group member. The implications of these results for research and theory on differential processing of in-group versus out-group members are discussed.     

Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility

Non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech. We demonstrate that this “processing difficulty” causes non-native speakers to sound less credible. People judged trivia statements such as “Ants don't sleep” as less true when spoken by a non-native than a native speaker. When people were made aware of the source of their difficulty they were able to correct when the accent was mild but not when it was heavy. This effect was not due to stereotypes of prejudice against foreigners because it occurred even though speakers were merely reciting statements provided by a native speaker. Such reduction of credibility may have an insidious impact on millions of people, who routinely communicate in a language which is not their native tongue.