[RL-Diss] First and Second Language Listening Comprehension and RLS Effects

In 2009, Kang and Rubin had American undergraduates listen to academic lectures and provided pictures and personal information of the speakers. Some students were told they were listening to a Chinese speaker, while others were told that they were listening to a white American speaker. Students who believed they listened to the Chinese speaker performed worse on listening comprehension tasks and reported that the speaker was accented, even though the audio files were identical and from a separate native speaker. The listeners in the study were graded on their performance; they were not sabotaging their own comprehension. Rather, listener expectations affected comprehension in ways beyond their conscious control. In contrast to ?Linguistic Stereotyping? in which listeners make judgments about speakers? origin, personality, or other traits based on their accent, Kang and Rubin called this observed effect ?Reverse Linguistic Stereotyping? (RLS). RLS is ?reversed? in the sense that listeners attribute an accent to a speaker based on the information about the speaker?s origin.

RLS effects have been replicated in several studies since then, but there has been heated debate concerning why these effects exist, or to what extent they are generalized to other settings. While Kang argues that the effects are straightforwardly caused by negative bias and lowered attention and effort, McGowan and others suggest that the effects occur because of a mismatch between people's expectations for accented speech and the actual audio signal. Lev-Ari and others, meanwhile, argue that it is people's tendency to think flexibly and remain agnostic on details and nuances when listening to non-native speakers that explains the phenomenon. She argues this in part by showing that people with higher working memory, which is normally associated with better performance on listening tests, was actually harmful in certain listening tasks with non-native speakers because people were more willing and able to entertain options about what the speaker might have meant, rather than simply listening to the literal meaning of the words.

These competing hypotheses were all based on very disparate types of tasks, with different participant groups and analyses, however. This study uses 8 experimental texts in different conditions, with "matched" and "mismatched" accent expectations, and with questions that specifically target nuances and details as well as others that target main ideas, in order to evaluate these three hypotheses against each other directly. Most importantly, there are three groups of listeners: white American listeners, Chinese students (who share the same background as the putative non-native speaker), and Korean students (who are also non-natives but out-group with respect to the putative non-native speaker), to examine how and whether bias and familiarity impact listening comprehension in these settings.

This study takes place in Bloomington, IN and is recruiting IU Bloomington undergraduate students.

Participants will be compensated for their participation.