African American English in Context: Hearing Race

The Brown Bag Speaker Series presents “African American English in Context: Hearing Race” with Yolanda Feimster Holt, an associate professor of communication sciences and disorders at East Carolina University.
For some time, efforts to categorize talker race have been attempted. This project evaluated listener categorization of talker socio-ethnic race. Familiar North Carolina and naïve (Indiana) listeners heard single words produced by Black and white Southern American English talkers from western and eastern North Carolina. Listener categorization accuracy was better than chance for all easter North Carolina talkers and for the white western North Carolina talkers. We suggest the frequent racial mis-categorization of some Black western North Carolina talkers is attributable to both vocal source and formant frequency characteristics. Results and the broader impact of these findings to sociolinguistics and to automatic speech recognition programming will be briefly discussed.