Acoustic Correlates of Perceived Racial Identity

This project investigates how long-term exposure to different types of voices affects the perception and identification of vocal identity. Although the own-race bias in memory for faces is well established, it is currently unknown whether the relevant dimensions for social auditory perception are tuned primarily by phonetic features of the language or anatomical/physiological features of a population of speakers.

Recordings of either White-American of Black-American voices are categorized as either "sounding White" or "sounding Black" by listeners from both racial groups. We then undertake acoustic analyses of the voices to determine whether there are specific auditory dimensions that predict racial categorization, as well as whether these dimensions differ based on the racial background of the listener.

Other participants are trained to recognize voices from different perceived racial categories, based on the subjective categorization of the listeners (above). We are interested in whether differential racial exposure affects individuals ability to identify voices from their own- versus the other-race category. Better performance on your own race than another race will indicate perceptual learning of the auditory system for preferrentially distinguishing voices sharing certain features.

Related Papers & Presentations

Manuscripts in preparation.

Investigators

Tyler Perrachione
Patrick Wong

Collaborator

Joan Chiao (Northwestern University)