Sounding Black or White: priming identity and biracial speech

By S. Gaither, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, Calvin L. Gidney, Keith B. Maddox. 2015

30 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research has shown that priming one’s racial identity can alter a biracial individuals’ social behavior, but can such priming also influence their speech? Language is often used as a marker of one’s social group membership and studies have shown that social context can affect the style of language that a person chooses to use, but this work has yet to be extended to the biracial population. Audio clips were extracted from a previous study involving biracial Black/White participants who had either their Black or White racial identity primed. Condition-blind coders rated Black-primed biracial participants as sounding significantly more Black and White-primed biracial participants as sounding significantly more White, both when listening to whole (Study 1a) and thin-sliced (Study 1b) clips. Further linguistic analyses (Studies 2a–c) were inconclusive regarding the features that differed between the two groups. Future directions regarding the need to investigate the intersections between social identity priming and language behavior with a biracial lens are discussed.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection (2021, background): “Based on prior work that correlates racial prejudice with negative attitudes towards AAE (Gaither et al., 2015; Rosa, 2019), we hypothesize that annotators who are white and who score high in RACISTBELIEFS will rate AAE posts as more toxic.”