Social Judgments of Digitally Manipulated Stuttered Speech: Cognitive Heuristics Drive Implicit and Explicit Bias

Explicit and implicit cognitive processes of the public towards people who stutter

PURPOSE

The Public Opinion Survey of Human Attributes - Stuttering (POSHA-S, St. Louis, 2013) was developed as a standard measure of public attitudes about people who stutter. As with any survey-based methods, threats to validity may occur because of social desirability bias. Using computer mouse-tracking, we were interested in observing changes in cognition that are manifested in intentionality through action by evaluating underlying cognitive processes that drive social judgments of people who stutter.

METHODS

Twenty-two women, 1 non-binary person, and 47 men reported using a computer mouse to complete an online, remote, and modified version of the POSHA-S. Responses were categorized as correct/helpful or incorrect/unhelpful relative to each component of the POSHA-S and were used as measures of explicit cognitive processes. Computer-mouse trajectory metrics, including area under the curve (AUC) and reaction time (RT), were used to measure implicit cognitive processes.

RESULTS

Although participants' explicit responses were significantly more likely to be correct/helpful than incorrect/unhelpful, with endorsement of correct/helpful prompts 77 % of the time, participants also endorsed incorrect/unhelpful prompts more than half (i.e., 52 %) of the time. Familiarity with people who stutter was associated with disagreeing with incorrect/unhelpful prompts. As indicated by greater AUC, participants exhibited significantly more implicit cognitive processes indicating competition when responding "disagree" compared to "agree", regardless of whether the prompts were correct/helpful or incorrect/unhelpful. Similarly, participants took significantly longer to respond to prompts with "disagree" rather than "agree".

CONCLUSION

The findings of this study offer evidence of participants reporting cognitive processes that are overall more correct/helpful than incorrect/unhelpful, in their explicit responses to the dichotomous response tasks of the POSHA-S. However, these findings are tempered by evidence of a tendency to agree with statements in the measure and suggest the need for further research to increase understanding of how to measure and improve explicit and implicit cognitive processes related to people who stutter.

Gender stereotypes and social perception of vocal confidence is mitigated by salience of socio-indexical cues to gender

Introduction

Socio-indexical cues to gender and vocal affect often interact and sometimes lead listeners to make differential judgements of affective intent based on the gender of the speaker. Previous research suggests that rising intonation is a common cue that both women and men produce to communicate lack of confidence, but listeners are more sensitive to this cue when it is produced by women. Some speech perception theories assume that listeners will track conditional statistics of speech and language cues (e.g., frequency of the socio-indexical cues to gender and affect) in their listening and communication environments during speech perception. It is currently less clear if these conditional statistics will impact listener ratings when context varies (e.g., number of talkers).

Methods

To test this, we presented listeners with vocal utterances from one female and one male-pitched voice (single talker condition) or many female/male-pitched voices (4 female voices; 4 female voices pitch-shifted to a male range) to examine how they impacted perceptions of talker confidence.

Results

Results indicated that when one voice was evaluated, listeners defaulted to the gender stereotype that the female voice using rising intonation (a cue to lack of confidence) was less confident than the male-pitched voice (using the same cue). However, in the multi-talker condition, this effect went away and listeners equally rated the confidence of the female and male-pitched voices.

Discussion

Findings support dual process theories of information processing, such that listeners may rely on heuristics when speech perception is devoid of context, but when there are no differentiating qualities across talkers (regardless of gender), listeners may be ideal adapters who focus on only the relevant cues.

Self-perceived outcomes of informative and apologetic self-disclosure: A mixed methods study

PURPOSE

Self-disclosure statements that are informative, rather than apologetic, have been demonstrated to improve listener perceptions of adults who stutter (Byrd et al., 2017). The purpose of the present study is to investigate the benefits of self-disclosure from the perspective of the speaker and to determine whether self-disclosure statement type is associated with self-perceived outcomes of use.

METHOD

A total of 156 adults who stutter completed a survey adapted from a previous study investigating affective, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes of voluntary stuttering. Survey responses were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics to determine if there was a significant relationship between self-disclosure statement type and self-reported outcomes. Additionally, responses to two open-ended questions relating to timing of self-disclosure and self-disclosure experiences in general were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis.

RESULTS

Self-disclosure was perceived as beneficial in at least one context by 96.8 % of respondents. Respondents who used an informative self-disclosure statement were more likely to agree that self-disclosure increased confidence and were less likely to report attempting to conceal or avoid stuttering than respondents who used an apologetic self-disclosure statement. Themes relating to additional aspects of self-disclosure experiences included personalized use, social connection, acceptance of stuttering, challenging cognitive distortions, communication is easier, self-empowerment, humor, voluntary stuttering, and vulnerability to prejudice.

CONCLUSION

Similar to studies investigating the influence of self-disclosure on listener perceptions, informative self-disclosure is associated with greater self-perceived benefits than apologetic self-disclosure for adults who stutter.

Impact of self-disclosure and communication competence on perceived listener distraction

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study was to investigate the distraction reported by unfamiliar adults when listening to a speaker who stutters, and whether listener distraction is influenced by two factors: self-disclosure and communication competence.

METHOD

Two hundred seventy-five adults watched a video vignette and were asked to rate their level of distraction when observing an adult Latinx male producing stuttered speech. Each participant watched one of six randomized videos of the same speaker sharing the same content systematically manipulated by (a) presence or absence of 15% stuttering, (b) presence or absence of self-disclosure, and (c) high or low communication competence.

RESULTS

Listener distraction was higher when rating speakers with low communication competence, regardless of whether stuttering or self-disclosure were heard. Videos wherein the speaker was fluent were rated as significantly less distracting, but only in the context of high communication competence. For videos wherein the speaker stuttered, listeners reported significantly less distraction when the speaker demonstrated high communication competence and self-disclosed.

FINDINGS

These findings suggest that for persons who stutter, high communication competence and disclosing that they stutter will yield maximum reduction in listener distraction.

Gender stereotypes drive perceptual differences of vocal confidence

One's ability to express confidence is critical to achieve one's goals in a social context-such as commanding respect from others, establishing higher social status, and persuading others. How individuals perceive confidence may be shaped by the socio-indexical cues produced by the speaker. In the current production/perception study, we asked four speakers (two cisgender women/men) to answer trivia questions under three speaking contexts: natural, overconfident, and underconfident (i.e., lack of confidence). An evaluation of the speakers' acoustics indicated that the speakers significantly varied their acoustic cues as a function of speaking context and that the women and men had significantly different acoustic cues. The speakers' answers to the trivia questions in the three contexts (natural, overconfident, underconfident) were then presented to listeners (N = 26) in a social judgment task using a computer mouse-tracking paradigm. Listeners were sensitive to the speakers' acoustic modulations of confidence and differentially interpreted these cues based on the perceived gender of the speaker, thereby impacting listeners' cognition and social decision making. We consider, then, how listeners' social judgments about confidence were impacted by gender stereotypes about women and men from social, heuristic-based processes.