UBC Researchers Molly Babel and Jamie Russell. | Photo courtesy of Jamie Russell.
Within Vancouver’s diverse society, Chinese Canadians form one of the largest ethnic groups. With the participation of self-identified Chinese and white Canadians in the Vancouver area, two researchers at the University of British Columbia have conducted a study, “Expectations and Speech Intelligibility,” that examines how people’s expectations and racial stereotypes influence the way people communicate.
Molly Babel is the study’s lead author and assistant professor in the department of linguistics at UBC. She points out that the diversity of Vancouver was important to the study.
“The University of British Columbia was a great place to conduct this study because of the large number of internationals here,” Babel says.
Expectations can be misleading
Participants were shown either a photo of the speaker or of three crosses. Photo courtesy of UBC
Babel and Jamie Russell, the co-author and an undergraduate student at the time of the study, selected 12 native speakers of Canadian English from Richmond to take part in the study. Six of the participants self-identified as white and six self-identified as Chinese.
Participants, who were all born and raised in Richmond, and between the ages of 17 and 25, recorded short sentences with noise in the background. The sentences were then played to 40 listeners from the university community (all native English speakers between 10 and 41 with diverse cultural backgrounds). Either a photo of the speaker or an image of three crosses was paired with each sentence.
When listeners saw the speakers’ photos, they considered the Chinese Canadians harder to understand than the white Canadians. When they were not aware of the speakers’ ethnic background, they considered the English of Chinese and white Canadians similarly intelligible. Babel says that people often think of a white person when thinking of a typical Canadian.
“That is not a fair portrayal of modern day Canada,” Babel adds. “This stereotypical thinking can get us into trouble.”
Listeners also rated how strong of a foreign accent each of the 12 participants had. They had to evaluate two sentences: one paired with the candidate’s photo, one paired with the image of the crosses. Chinese Canadians’ voices were generally rated as more accented than white Canadians’ voices.
However, listeners’ expectations and biases had a significant impact, too. The voices of the white Canadians were rated less accented and more native-like when listeners saw the speakers’ photos and were aware of their ethnicity. Listeners perceived Chinese Canadian candidates to have a slightly stronger foreign accent when they saw their photos.
The study will continue
One of the biggest challenges for the researchers was deciding how to test and talk about these issues in the context of Canada.
“Most work along these lines had been done in the United States, which has different cultural and social dynamics than Canada,” says Babel.
Nevertheless, Babel says they want to resume the study.
“We plan to pair white participants, who aren’t native speakers of English, with Asian native speakers of English and examine how long it will take for listeners’ expectations to adjust.”
The researchers assume that listeners will most likely consider the Asian participants to speak less native-like. As in the first part of the study, which they started in 2013, they will ask listeners to transcribe sentences among noise. They then plan to reduce the noise slowly to figure out at which point listeners realize that their expectations do not match reality.
Babel also organizes the Speech in Context Lab, a research group that studies speech perception and expectations and focuses on spoken language. She has been with UBC since 2009. Originally from Minnesota, she received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
To read more about the study, please visit www.news.ubc.ca/2015/05/26/how-racial-stereotypes-impact-the-way-we-communicate/
