In this study, I plan to investigate how self-perceived power can influence the perception of speech. Researchers have previously observed that the /s/-/ʃ/ category boundary of English-speaking listeners tends to vary depending upon what gender they believe the speaker to be (Strand & Johnson 1996), and, furthermore, that this expectation tends to be of social origin (Munson 2011). Self-perceived power has also been observed to influence how individuals use information linked with a social category (e.g. Keltner et al. 2003): high-power individuals will tend to rely more significantly on information associated with a social category (even to the exclusion of information that contradicts this expectation) (Goodwin et al. 2000). I intend to see how these two phenomena interact – in cases where one assigns a social category to another individual and a linguistic variable is associated with this category, will high-power individuals rely more heavily than low-power individuals on their expectation of the variable's production in perceiving the linguistic form?

To answer this question, I will randomly assign participants to a high or low power group, and they will be primed for power-level (priming technique drawn from Galinsky et al. 2006). The participants will then complete a matched guise identification task. They will see a male or female picture and will listen to a continuum of KLAAT generated sibilants spliced with the vowel [ɑɪ] (taken from naturalistic speech) to produce words ambiguous between “shy” and “sigh”; the gender of the speaker will match that of the picture. The participant's primary task will be to identify whether the word they heard was “sigh” or “shy”. Afterwards, they will complete short non-linguistic behavioral task to confirm the effectiveness of the power prime.

For my presentation, I will review relevant literature, discuss methodology, and present experimental stimuli. I welcome any and all advice.