The Role of Valence and Speaker Identity in False Hearing

Contextual expectations are essential for understanding the speech of others. Context can be so influential that the mismatch of expectation and actual speech can lead to a phenomenon known as false hearing. Rogers (2017) found that when listeners were primed with a semantic associate (e.g. ROW) prior to a word in noise (e.g. GOAT), listeners were likely to report hearing the word related to the prime word (e.g. BOAT), even when it was not presented. Another type of context may come in the form of attitudes or beliefs toward a speaker. For example, Ingvalson et al. (2017) found that personal attitudes towards accented speakers can predict speech understanding. The current work explores whether a negative attitude or stereotype toward a speaker influences what listeners hear. Specifically, our project asks if attitudes towards an out-group can change the perception of spoken words. We developed a priming procedure from 157 phonologically similar target pairs that were either positive (e.g. MOM) or negative (e.g. BOMB). Each word was preceded by a prime that was either related to the target (e.g. DAD-MOM) or unrelated to the target (e.g. ATOMIC-MOM). All stimuli were recorded by two women wearing two types of masks: a Niqab, a religious garment worn by some Muslim women, or a KF-94 surgical mask. We predicted that listeners who were higher in Islamophobia would be more likely to hear negative words (ATOMIC-BOMB) even when positive words were presented (ATOMIC-MOM). Such a finding would be essential to understand the role of stereotypes on speech understanding, expand the domain of what constitutes context in the speech perception literature, and highlight the use of the false hearing task as an indirect measure of Islamophobia.