Perceived Linguistic Marginalization and Speech Intelligibility in a Racially Diverse Cohort of Talkers

Studies suggest that the listeners’ social categorizations of talkers may mediate how intelligible those talkers’ speech is perceived to be (Babel & Russel, 2015; McGowan, 2015; Kutlu et al., 2021; Kutlu et al., 2022; McLaughlin et al., 2022; Yi et al., 2013). One interpretation of these findings is that talkers’ attitudes toward different racialized groups affects intelligibility. Studies have used implicit association tests (Greenwald et al., 1998) to test this hypothesis. Some studies have found that negative implicit associations with specific groups (i.e., Asian Americans) predict intelligibility (Yi et al.) while others have found no association (McLaughlin et al.). In this presentation, we present a new tool to examine listeners’ attitudes toward different racialized groups. The Perceived Linguistic Marginalization Scale (PLMS, based on the Perceived Societal Marginalization Scale, Bulwerk et al., 2022) directly examines individuals’ beliefs about the significance of language variation in marking groups of people as marginalized. In this poster, we present the results of 242 participants’ performance on the PLMS. We examine whether performance on the PLMS predicts audio-only and audio-visual intelligibility of 28 racially diverse talkers in a speech intelligibility experiment. Data collection is complete and analysis is ongoing. [Funded by NIH grant R21 DC018070]