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'Who is in your network? Racial and linguistic diversity impact the perception of different English varieties', Drs. Ethan Kutlu and Debra Titone, hosted by Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein

May 26, 2021, 11:00 am to 12:30 pm

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Join us for this Language Science Talks by Drs. Ethan Kutlu and Debra Titone, and hosted by affiliate member and Concordia University Psychology Associate Professor Krista Byers-Heinlein. Everyone is welcome to attend!

Abstract: The emergence of different English varieties is a result of different contextual factors such as globalization, colonialism, and migration. Understanding individual variability that is observed in how these different varieties are perceived is a question in speech perception, psycholinguistic, as well as social understanding of multilingualism studies. Here, multiple experiments measured how three different English varieties (American, British, Indian) are perceived by listeners who live in racially and linguistically more (Montreal) or less (Gainesville) diverse communities. We’ll present multiple studies that investigate how listeners’ perception of these three varieties were modulated depending on their social context which was measured by network and entropy tools. We’ll also discuss how social network analyses can be implemented in broader multilingualism research. Our findings open up a discussion of socially-gated speech perception and how language research benefits from interdisciplinary and multi-site designs.

Speaker bios: Dr. Ethan Kutlu is an Instructor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Iowa and is affiliated with the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa, the DeLTA Center at the University of Iowa, and the Brain Cognition and Development Lab at the University of Florida. Dr. Debra Titone is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in Language & Multilingualism (Tier I). She is director of the McGill Language & Multilingualism Lab.

If you require an accessibility-related measure (e.g.: sign language interpretation, captioning, or any other accessibility-related measure), please contact Alex Walls at alex.walls@ubc.ca or 778 984 6173.


First Nations land acknowledegement

We acknowledge that UBC’s campuses are situated within the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, and in the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation and their peoples.


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