Race, Racialization, and Racism in Speech Perception: Past, Present, and Future

Individuals make inferences about people’s race from the way they speak [Purnell et al. (1999)]. Moreover, people’s assumptions about individuals’ race shape the way that they perceive the form and content of the messages that people produce [Rubin (1992); Staum Casasanto (2008); McGowan (2015)]. In this talk, we step back from empirical studies on this topic and consider what it means to perceive a person’s race. Our work situates the perception of talker race in the framework developed by Tripp and Munson (2021) to explain social perception and language perception more generally. We argue that racialization involves distinguishing groups of persons, which are abstractly defined, with perception measures depending upon the racial categories participants believe are perceptible, real, desirable, powerful and normative. The parsing of individuals into different imaginary person-kinds emerges from beliefs about the significance of differences between body-minds. Individuals’ perception reveals an interplay among personally held ideologies, identities, and awareness of societally dominant narratives. We speculate on how these processes might have been at play in previous studies on the influence of race on speech perception. We provide a research agenda for robustly assessing the perception of person-kinds when studying how perceived race interacts with the perception of speech.