Race-relevant cues influence the processing of linguistic variation: Evidence from African American English and Mainstream American English

Race-relevant cues, whether vocal or visual, shape how listeners process the incoming speech signal. In order to better understand how these cues inform sentence-level processing, we asked listeners to rate the plausibility of three different sentence types: (a) plausible in both Mainstream American English (MAE) and African American English (AAE), (b) implausible in both, or (c) plausible in AAE, but not MAE. Across three experiments, we manipulated the type of race-relevant cues provided to listeners, who all identified as MAE-speakers. Experiment 1 (n = 72) used written sentences and therefore did not provide vocal or visual cues, Experiment 2 (n = 72) provided vocal cues to speaker background, and Experiment 3 (n = 72) provided vocal and visual cues to speaker background. Results show that MAE-speaking listeners readily incorporated race-relevant cues when processing these sentences. In particular, findings indicate that expectations associating African Americans with utterances implausible from an MAE-perspective inform sentence-level processing.