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Racial stereotypes and expectations can impact the way we communicate and understand others, according to UBC research. The new study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, highlights how non-verbal "social cues" - such as photographs of Chinese Canadians - can affect how we comprehend speech.
"This research brings to light our internal biases, and the role of experience and stereotypes, in how we listen to and hear each other," says Molly Babel, the paper's lead author and an assistant professor with UBC's Department of Linguistics.
One of the study's tasks involved participants from the UBC community transcribing pre-recorded sentences amid background static. The sentences were recorded by 12 native speakers of Canadian English. Half of the speakers self-identified as White, and the other half self-identified as Chinese. All speakers were born and raised in Richmond, B.C., which is south of Vancouver.
The pre-recorded sentences were accompanied by either black and white photos of the speakers, or by an image of three crosses. Overall, listeners found the Chinese Canadians more difficult to understand than the White Canadians - but only when they were made aware that the speaker was Chinese Canadian due to the photo prompt.
Participants were also asked to rate the strength of the accents of the speakers. They were asked to listen to two sentences from each speaker - one accompanied by the speaker's photo, the other by an image of crosses. "Once participants were aware that they were listening to a White Canadian, suddenly the candidate was perceived as having less of a foreign accent and sounding more like a native speaker of Canadian English," says Babel.
"It tells us as listeners that we need to be sensitive about the stereotypes that we carry," notes Jamie Russell, the study's co-author who was an undergraduate honours student in UBC's Department of Linguistics during the project.
http://phys.org/news/2015-05-racial-stereotypes-impact.html
[Abstract]: http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/137/5/10.1121/1.4919317
[Source]: http://news.ubc.ca/2015/05/26/how-racial-stereotypes-impact-the-way-we-communicate/
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 29 2015, @03:48PM
but mostly it amuses me. When I lived in Japan I had a Japanese-Canadian girlfriend who didn't speak a lick of Japanese. I spoke it reasonably well, having taken four years of it in college. We would walk into stores together and I would conduct the entire conversation with the salespeople who could not stop acting like they were actually talking to my girlfriend, because she looked utterly Japanese while I looked utterly white. Sometimes I thought they would get whiplash the way they jerked their heads back and forth in astonishment at the Japanese words that were coming out of my mouth instead of hers.
Later I had similar experiences with Chinese in Beijing. I had learned Mandarin at an immersion program in Manchuria, which is where the purest, clearest Mandarin is spoken (it's like the Oxford English of English). Beijingers refused to understand what I was saying until I adopted the Beijing "growl" (the local accent) and broke the spell of non-comprehension; it nearly always put them in stitches. But their faces never did lose the dazed look that betrayed how they didn't fully accept that they could understand me.
I never was offended by it, though, and have always taken it as another way that people can be silly. My wife and I have fun with it, too. She was born in Seoul but grew up in Brooklyn and says "ole" instead of "all." She will speak very slowly like I'm an idiot who can't understand English.
Washington DC delenda est.