Cover not available
Article published In:
Asia-Pacific Language Variation
Vol. 4:2 (2018) ► pp.231–252

Same stimuli, same subjects, different perception

Believed dialect bias in the perception of Chinese plosives

 | Fryske Akademy | Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
 | Radboud University | Tongji University
Believed dialect influences speech perception by linguistically naïve speakers. How much accent-induced bias affects perception of linguistically trained speakers is still unclear. This study experimentally investigates the influence of believed dialect on plosive perception by subjects who were phonetically and phonologically trained. Identical syllables were presented twice to each subject. In one session, the subjects were informed that the variety was a Mandarin dialect which has voiceless unaspirated and aspirated voiceless stops; and in the other session that it was a Wu dialect, which has voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and breathy stops. More breathy stops were reported if Wu was the believed dialect. Plosive phonation in Wu is related to lexical tone, and we show that lexical tone causes another bias to plosive perception. This suggests that linguistically trained transcribers are susceptible to higher order linguistic knowledge and it demonstrates the difficulty of avoiding biased perception when the coder forms a belief about the variety that he/she transcribes. We also advocate speech perception models which include a component that accounts for the role of expected sounds.
Keywords: Mandarin, Wu, accent-induced bias, perceptual bias, plosive phonation
Article outline
  • 1.Sociolinguistic categorization
  • 2.Coder bias
  • 3.Plosives and tones in Mandarin and Wu
    • 3.1Plosives
    • 3.2Tones in Mandarin and Wu
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Approach
    • 4.2Material
    • 4.3Subjects
    • 4.4Procedure
    • 4.5Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 6 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.17006.slo
References (59)
References
Bever, Thomas G., & Chiarello, Robert J. (1974). Cerebral dominance in musicians and nonmusicians. Science, 1851, 537–539. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul, & Weenink, David (2010). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. [Computer program, version 5.3].Google Scholar
Cao, Jianfen, & Maddieson, Ian (1989). An exploration of phonation types in Wu dialects of Chinese. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 721, 139–160.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. K., & Trudgill, Peter (1998). Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chao, Yuen Ren (1967). Contrastive aspects of the Wu dialects. Language, 41(1), 92–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1930). A system of tone-letters. Le Maître Phonétique, 451, 24–27.Google Scholar
Chen, Li-mei, Chao, Kuan-Yi, & Peng, Jui-Feng (2007). VOT productions of word-initial stops in Mandarin and English: A cross-language study. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing , 303–317.
Chen, Matthew Y. (2000). Tone sandhi: Patterns across Chinese dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Zhongmin (2010). 吴语清音浊流的声学特征及鉴定标志——以上海话为例. [An Acoustic Study of Voiceless Onset Followed by Breathiness of Wu Dialects: Based on the Shanghai Dialect], Studies in Language and Linguistics, 30(3), 20–34.Google Scholar
Christy, Andrea L., & Munson, Benjamin. (2012). The influence of imputed race on speech perception: Effects of experience and implicit attitudes. University of Minnesota. (Poster presented at LabPhon 27-29 July 2012, Stuttgart).Google Scholar
Clopper, Cynthia G., & Pisoni, David B. (2004). Some acoustic cues for the perceptual categorization of American English regional dialects. Journal of Phonetics, 32(1), 111–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Drager, Katie (2005). From bad to bed: The relationship between perceived age and vowel perception in New Zealand English. Te Reo, 481, 55–68.Google Scholar
(2010). Sociophonetic variation in speech perception. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4(7), 473–480. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2011). Speaker age and vowel perception. Language and Speech, 54(1), 99–121. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duanmu, San (2000). Phonology of Chinese (Mandarin) (Second edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Foulkes, Paul, & Docherty, Gerard (2006). The social life of phonetics and phonology. Journal of Phonetics, 34(4), 409–438. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Foulkes, Paul, Scobbie, James M., & Watt, Dominic (2010). Sociophonetics. In William J. Hardcastle, John Laver, & Fiona E. Gibbon (Eds.), The handbook of phonetic sciences (Second edition) (pp. 703–754). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Friston, Karl (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gao, Jiayin, & Hallé, Pierre (2012). Caractérisation acoustique des obstruantes phonologiquement voisées du dialecte de Shanghai [Acoustic properties of phonologically voiced obstruents in Shanghai dialect], Actes De JEP-TALN-RECITAL, 11, 145–152.Google Scholar
(2013). Duration as a secondary cue for perception of voicing and tone in Shanghai Chinese. Paper presented at the INTERSPEECH , 3157–3161.
Hall-Lew, Lauren, & Fix, Sonya (2012). Perceptual coding reliability of (L)-vocalization in casual speech data. Lingua, 122(7), 794–809. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Nolan, Aaron, & Drager, Katie (2006). From fush to feesh: Exemplar priming in speech perception. The Linguistic Review, 23(3), 351–379. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Warren, Paul, & Drager, Katie (2006). Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics, 34(4), 458–484. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer and Drager, Katie (2010). Stuffed toys and speech perception. Linguistics, 48(4), 865–892. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Henton, Caroline, Ladefoged, Peter, & Maddieson, Ian (1992). Stops in the world’s languages. Phonetica, 49(2), 65–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet, & Meyerhoff, Miriam (2008). The handbook of language and gender. Malden/Oxford/Berlin: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Johnson, Keith, Strand, Elizabeth A., & D’Imperio, Mariapaola (1999). Auditory – visual integration of talker gender in vowel perception. Journal of Phonetics, 27(4), 359–384. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William (2001). Principles of linguistic change: Social factors (Volume 2). Malden; Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
(2006). The social stratification of English in New York city. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Charles N., & Thompson, Sandra A. (1989). Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. London: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lindblom, Björn, & Maddieson, Ian (1988). Phonetic universals in consonant systems. In Larry M. Hyman & Charles N. Li (Eds.), Language, speech and mind (pp. 62–78). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lisker, Leigh, & Abramson, Arthur S. (1970). The voicing dimension: Some experiments in comparative phonetics. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the sixth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences , 563–567.
Maddieson, Ian, & Disner, Sandra Ferrari (1984). Patterns of sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milroy, Lesley, & Gordon, Matthew (2008). Sociolinguistics: Method and interpretation. Malden; Oxford; Melbourne; Berlin: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Milroy, Lesley, & Milroy, James (1992). Social network and social class: Toward an integrated sociolinguistic model. In James Milroy & Lesley Milroy (Eds.), Language in society (pp. 1–26). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Munson, Benjamin, & Babel, Molly (2007). Loose lips and silver tongues, or, projecting sexual orientation through speech. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(5), 416–449. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Niedzielski, Nancy (1999). The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 18(1), 62–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pietraszewski, David, & Schwartz, Alex (2014). Evidence that accent is a dimension of social categorization, not a byproduct of perceptual salience, familiarity, or ease-of-processing. Evolution and Human Behavior, 35(1), 43–50. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Preston, Dennis R. (1993). Folk dialect maps. In Arthur Wayne Glowka & Donald M. Lance (Eds.), Language variation in North American English: Research and Teaching (pp. 333–377). New York: Modern Language Association of America.Google Scholar
Purnell, Thomas, Idsardi, William, & Baugh, John (1999). Perceptual and phonetic experiments on American English dialect identification. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 18(1), 10–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
R Development Core Team. (2009). R: A language and environment for statistical computing [computer software]. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available from [URL]
Rakić, Tamara, Steffens, Melanie C., & Mummendey, Amélie (2011). Blinded by the accent! The minor role of looks in ethnic categorization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(1), 409–438. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rose, Phil (2002). Tonal complexity as conditioning Factor – More depressing Wenzhou dialect disyllabic lexical tone sandhi. Proceedings of the 9th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 64–69). Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.Google Scholar
Rubin, Donald L. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33(4), 511–531. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simpson, Adrian P. (2009). Phonetic differences between male and female speech. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(2), 621–640. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sloos, Marjoleine (2013). Halo! Don’t always trust the native speaker. Proceedings of the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) 2012 (pp. 325–350).Google Scholar
(2015). Misperception as a result of accent-induced coder bias. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 13(1), 59–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sloos, Marjoleine, Andersson, Alexandra, Garcia, Andrea Ariza, & Neijmeijer, Mathea (2018). Accent-induced bias in linguistic transcriptions. Language Sciences. Available from DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sloos, Marjoleine, Ran, Yunyun, & van de Weijer, Jeroen (2015). Huangyan Taizhou. Manuscript submitted for publication.Google Scholar
Sohoglu, Ediz, Peelle, Jonathan E., Carlyon, Robert P., & Davis, Matthew H. (2012). Predictive top-down integration of prior knowledge during speech perception. The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 32(25), 8443–8453. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Strand, Elizabeth A. (1999). Uncovering the role of gender stereotypes in speech perception. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 18(1), 86–100. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tannen, Deborah (1996). Gender and discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Traunmüller, Hartmut, & Eriksson, Anders (1995). The frequency range of the voice fundamental in the speech of male and female adults. [Unpublished manuscript]. Retrieved December 18, 2014, from [URL]
Tseng, Chiu-yu (2011). Phonotactic and discourse aspects of content design in AESOP (Asian English speech corpus project). Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments (Oriental COCOSDA) (pp. 24–29). IEEE Catalogue Number: CFP1208H-PRT 978-1-4673-2811-1. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williams, Angie, Garrett, Peter, & Coupland, Nikolas (1999). Dialect recognition. In David R. Preston (Ed.), Handbook of perceptual dialectology (pp. 345–358). Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Rutuh (1997). Gender and discourse. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Wurm, Stephen A., Li, Rong, & Baumann, Theo (1988). 中国社会科学院 [Language atlas of China: Parts I and II]. Hong Kong: Longman Group (Far East) Limited.Google Scholar
Zee, Eric, & Maddieson, Ian (1979). Tones and tone sandhi in Shanghai: Phonetic evidence and phonological analysis. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 451, 93–129.Google Scholar
Zhang, Jisheng (2006). The phonology of Shaoxing Chinese. Doctoral thesis, Leiden University.Google Scholar