1. Assessing the Effects of "Native Speaker" Status on Classic Findings in Speech Research.
- Author
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Strand, Julia F., Brown, Violet A., Sewell, Katrina, Lin, Yuxin, Lefkowitz, Emmett, and Saksena, Caroline G.
- Abstract
It is common practice in speech research to only sample participants who self-report being "native English speakers." Although there is research on differences in language processing between native and nonnative listeners (see Lecumberri et al., 2010, for a review), the majority of speech research that aims to establish general findings (e.g., testing models of spoken word recognition) only includes native speakers in their sample. Not only is the "native English speaker" criterion poorly defined, but it also excludes historically underrepresented groups from speech perception research, often without attention to whether this exclusion is likely to affect study outcomes. The purpose of this study is to empirically test whether and how using different inclusion criteria ("native English speakers" vs. "nonnative English speakers") affects several well-known phenomena in speech perception research. Five hundred participants completed word (N = 200) and sentence (N = 300) identification tasks in quiet and in moderate levels of background noise. Results indicate that multiple classic findings in speech perception research—including the effects of noise level, lexical density, and semantic context on speech intelligibility—persist regardless of "native English" speaking status. However, the magnitude of some of these effects differed across participant groups. Taken together, these results suggest that researchers should carefully consider whether native speaker status is likely to affect outcomes and make decisions about inclusion criteria on a study-by-study basis. Public Significance Statement: Most research in experimental psychology is conducted on undergraduates enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States and other Western countries. Research on spoken language often further homogenizes samples to include only "native" speakers of the language. Here, we show that for some general research questions (i.e., those that do not specifically aim to address differences in language processing between individuals with different first languages), this restriction may not substantially influence study outcomes. In conducting this research, we hope to encourage researchers to carefully consider whether restricting samples to "native" speakers is necessary, thereby promoting inclusivity in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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