Date of Award

6-2022

Document Type

Restricted (Opt-Out)

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

Department

Neuroscience

First Advisor

Chad Rogers

Keywords

Psycholinguistics, Audiovisual Speech, Cognitive Neuroscience, Implicit Bias, Islam, Language

Abstract

This study presents a comprehensive set of audiovisual and orthographic stimuli, as well as a priming procedure, for investigating affective bias toward speakers wearing certain kinds of face masks. Recent research has examined how listeners’ use of visual information (i.e. lip and mouth movements) is affected by the shielding of respiratory masks worn during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, relatively little research has examined how other types of masks, such as those worn for religious or cultural practices, impact listeners’ speech understanding. Thus, assessing the effects of social perceptions of types of masks and its effect on audiovisual speech perception necessitates the development of a database stimulus set that would give researchers a set of words controlled for specific lexical characteristics and audiovisual stimuli of in-group and outgroup confederates enunciating these words. For the stimulus present, I present 960 words, 480 of which include audiovisual recordings words and 480 of which are cue words in written form only. Two-thirds of words in this stimulus set (640 words of 960) form semantic associations based on positive (160 audiovisual targets and 160 cues) and, negative (160 audiovisual targets and 160 cues) valence. The remaining words are comprised of 320 neutral words (160 audiovisual targets and 160 cues). Confederates wearing KF-94 masks and Niqab enunciating each of the target words were recorded. Summary statistics on the lexical characteristics of the stimulus set were recorded. This study concludes with experiment proposals on listener bias toward outgroup speakers, particularly Western attitudes towards Muslim speakers, to be run with this stimulus set.

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Rights Statement

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted.