Veronica Vazquez Olivieri is a senior who is majoring in Psychology. She was awarded a Fall 2018 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on the social significance of speaking styles under Dr. Lynne Nygaard.
For someone who wants to pursue a doctoral program after graduation, applying and receiving funding from Emory’s Undergraduate Research Program is a great scaffolding step. Participating in independent research has been gratifying and valuable since the very beginning of the applicationprocess primarily because you have to write a formal proposal of your research. Furthermore, it exposes you to the importance of conducting ethical research when thinking about how you will treat and test participants. Most importantly, it confers a sense of responsibility and autonomybecause you are no longer assisting someone’s research, rather you are the lead researcher and the obtained outcomes will reflect the amount of work you invested. As a researcher, I am intrigued by how social factors influence our perceptions, judgements, and behaviors.These interests led me to seek out an honors thesis mentored by Dr. Lynne Nygaard that permitted me to study the social influences that affect an individual’s perception of speech.
More specifically, I am examining how social knowledge and experience with particular types of speakers (e.g., older adults) affect the perception of aspects of pronunciation (e.g., consonants that depend on timing information). Past research has shown that speakers and groups of speakers vary in the way they pronounce speech sounds and that listeners use these linguistic cues to draw conclusions about social characteristics of their conversational partners. My thesis examines how listeners use cues such as speaking rate and voice onset time (VOT), defined as the timing between the release consonant and the onset of voicing, to judge the age of a speaker and how those judgments influence how we perceive their speech. Given that past research has shown that it is possible to estimate an unfamiliar speaker’s age based on their VOT distributions, I considered VOT an important avenue for exploring how social information affects acoustic realization.
Currently, I have been able to test how manipulating VOT can change a listener’s perception of a specific word. Specifically, I created VOT continuums that ranged from /b/ to /p/ (i.e., beak-peak) that consisted of nine steps, whereby the ends can be clearly categorized as beak or peak, but the middle tokens are more ambiguous. After consenting, ten individuals participated in a twenty-minute task where they categorized the auditory stimuli as beginning with a /b/ or with a /p/. In the pictures below, one can see the testing room the participants used during the task (Picture 1) and a graph that represents the responses for the beak-peak continuum (Picture 2). With respect to the graph, the participants were accurate in identifying the end points of the continuum and showed a symmetrical response pattern between them. As one can see, almost all participants recognized the first steps of the continuum as beginning with a /b/ when presented with a clear “beak”, but the answers became more ambiguous as the middle tokens of the continuum were presented. Likewise, one can also see how the participants perceived a clear /p/ toward the last steps of the continuum when the auditory stimulus approached a clearer “peak”.
Ultimately, the obtained data aligns with previous research in how the perception of speech can be shifted through manipulations of VOT. I plan to follow this experiment by testing how priming social knowledge of a speaker (I.e. age) can shift how listeners are perceiving particular speech sounds. If the social characteristics of a speaker can fundamentally alter a listener’s perception of speech, it would suggest that our judgments of others may influence what we hear and attend to during spoken communication.
Participating in the URP Organization has been extremely rewarding because it has solidified my desire to pursue a career in psychological research and to apply for other competitive grants and fellowships.I highly recommend this experience to anyone who may be considering a career in research because it will not only teach you about yourself and your work ethic, but it will also help shape you into a researcher.
Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.
Comments
Post a Comment