Affective attitudes towards Asians influence perception of Asian-accented vowels

Previous studies have shown that speech perception can shift because of cognitive attitudes about the speaker, but little is known about affective attitudes in speech perception. In our study, we investigated how affective attitudes towards Asians relate to the perception of Asian-accented vowels by native Australian English listeners. Affective attitudes were assessed with an established scale from the social psychology literature adapted to our specific purpose. Vowel perception was assessed using a vowel categorization task. Results show that the degree of dislike towards Asians negatively correlates with listeners’ accuracy in vowel categorization. The results also provide evidence that cognitive attitudes elicit affective attitudes, and suggest the appropriateness of using social psychological tools to explicitly evaluate the role of affective attitudes in speech perception.