The changing social context of speech perception: Comparisons across age and time

Beliefs about talkers' social-group membership affect how listeners perceive their speech: listeners identify phonemes differently depending on whether they believe that the talker was a man or a woman (Strand and Johnson, 1996; Munson, 2011), whether the talker was young or old (Drager, 2011), and whether the talker is gay or straight (Mack and Munson, 2012). These social influences are thought to reflect knowledge of social norms associated with categories such as gender, age, and sexuality. Social norms themselves are subject to change. For example, attitudes toward gay and lesbian people have changed dramatically in the past 15 years. For example, a strong majority of young adults now report having a positive view of sexual minorities. This talk reports on ongoing studies in our lab that have examined whether changes in social norms about gender and sexual orientation are associated with changes in how talkers' gender and sexual orientation affect listeners' speech perception (Obeda and Munson, 2018; Obeda et al., 2018). We have found robust differences between archival data from our lab from 2003 and both older and younger listeners tested in 2018. This talk will discuss the implications of these findings for models of speech perception more generally.