Look Who’s Talking: Examining the role of racialized beliefs in language processing and speaker judgments

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: We heavily depend on information about who is talking, as well as our prior beliefs about the world, to construct meaning. However, there exists little empirical research on the role of preconceived notions and stereotypes in how we process utterances and judge their speakers. In a series of three experiments, I examine how racialized ideologies affect both language comprehension and listeners’ judgments of different speakers. I first investigate whether racialized stereotypes and beliefs affect comprehension using a series of self-paced reading tasks (Experiments 1 & 2), and then ask whether racial (and gendered) biases affect the degree to which listeners penalize speakers for interrupting (Experiment 3). Experiments 1 and 2 provided no evidence for the activation of racialized stereotypes. The findings from Experiment 3 suggest that race and gender significantly affect how a speaker is judged. When interrupting, female speakers were judged to be less prosocial, more aggressive, and less intelligent than male speakers. And when interrupting, Black speakers were judged to be less prosocial, and more aggressive than White speakers. These results suggest that the perceived race and gender of a speaker — and the implicit biases associated with race and gender — affect how harshly a listener penalizes that speaker for interrupting. This penalization has broader consequences in larger societal systems including the courtroom and classroom.

Author	Manko, Dean	https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6812-8148 (unverified)

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Preferred citation: Manko, D. (2022). Look Who’s Talking: Examining the role of racialized beliefs in language processing and speaker judgments. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/pr700yy6345

Master's Theses, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University

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