Hearing What You Expect to Hear: The Interaction of Social and Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Vocal Accommodation Public

Abstract

Abstract
Hearing What You Expect to Hear:
The Interaction of Social and Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Vocal
Accommodation
During spoken communication, individuals accommodate or change the way they speak
based on characteristics of their conversational partner (Giles & Powesland, 1975; Giles,
Scherer, & Taylor, 1979; Miller, 2005). Evidence suggests that accommodation may be
due to a fundamental perceptual-production link (Fowler & Galantucci, 2005; Pardo, 2006;
Pardo & Remez, 2006) that results in automatic vocal alignment with an interlocutor.
However, social motivations have also been proposed as the primary underlying
mechanism for accommodation (Giles, 1973; Giles & Coupland, 1991) because a variety of
social factors have been shown to significantly influence the degree and type of vocal
accommodation that occurs. This dissertation was designed to investigate how social
variables might interact with underlying perception-production representations and
mechanisms in speech vocal accommodation. The set of experiments sought to determine
a) if adult listeners could perceptually identify characteristics of talker's voice such as
speech rate and age that were used as indices to measure vocal accommodation and b) if
perceptual-motor representations are accessed continuously and automatically during the
perception of vocal stimuli even in situations when social context is unclear or ambiguous
and finally c) whether social expectations about characteristics of a talker's voice, in this
case age, can affect accommodation in a minimally social context. The findings from the
first experiment showed that listeners could perceptually identify speech rate and age, and
vocal accommodation occurred even in a minimal social context, but was not necessarily
affected by implicit social variables. The second experiment investigated the extent to
which social variables influence the perceptual-motor processing of speech when these
variables were highlighted. Participants were primed with social stereotypes about age that
have been shown to be reflected in speaking style and then were asked to shadow or repeat
words produced by an age ambiguous speaker. Illusory accommodation did occur such
that participants accommodated towards an expected vocal behavior rather than vocal
characteristics actually present in the acoustic signal. These findings have implications for
how social mechanisms interact with perceptual-motor representation and processing
during vocal accommodation.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
I. Introduction ................................................................................... 1
a. Evidence for Perception Production Links...............................................4
b. Perception Production Link Account .....................................................15
c. Social Motivations Underlying Vocal Accommodation............................... 19
d. Social Expectations and Stereotypes....................................................24
e. The Current Investigation...................................................................29
II. Experiment 1a ................................................................................ 32
a. Method ..........................................................................................33
i. Participants .................................................................................... .33
ii. Stimuli ........................................................................................... 34
iii. Procedure....................................................................................... 35
b. Results and Discussion ...................................................................... 36
i. Overall Analyses..................................................................................36
ii. Analyses of Individual Speakers.............................................................39
III. Experiment 1b ................................................................................ 43
a. Method ............................................................................................45
i. Participants .......................................................................................45
ii. Stimuli ............................................................................................. 45
iii. Procedure ........................................................................................45
b. Results and Discussion ........................................................................47
i. Duration measurements.........................................................................47
ii. Response latencies..............................................................................48

IV. Experiment 2.....................................................................................50
a. Method..............................................................................................52
i. Participants ........................................................................................52
ii. Stimuli............................................................................................... 53
iii. Procedure ..........................................................................................55
b. Results and Discussion ..........................................................................56
i. Duration measurements...........................................................................56
ii. Response latencies................................................................................57
VI. General Discussion ..............................................................................60
VII. References .......................................................................................79
VIII. Appendix.........................................................................................105

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Psychology
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, Cognitive
Mot-clé	Cognition and Spoken Language Perception Production Communication Accommodation
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Nygaard, Lynne, Emory University
Committee Members	Barsalou, Lawrence, Emory University Gouzoules, Harold, Emory University Tuten, Donald, Emory University Namy, Laura, Emory University

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