Perceptions of social class through Chinese speech cues

Area of Science:

• Sociolinguistics
• Auditory Perception
• Psychology

Background:

• Speech conveys linguistic and non-linguistic information, including social class.
• Previous research on social class perception in speech is limited for Chinese compared to English.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate social class perception in Chinese speech.
• To determine if listeners can infer social class from Chinese speech.
• To explore how listeners' own class background influences perception.

Main Methods:

• Study 1: Class judgment and evaluation tasks using a subjective social class scale.
• Study 2: Analysis of speech characteristics differentiating social classes.

Main Results:

• Listeners accurately discriminated speakers' social classes, with a potential bias towards overestimating lower-class speakers as upper-class.
• Higher-class Chinese speech was perceived as more standardized, pleasant, and less accent-intensive.
• Listeners can infer social class from Chinese speech, which contains distinct indexical information.

Conclusions:

• Listeners can perceive social class information from Chinese speech.
• Differences in speech patterns exist across social classes in Chinese.
• Findings align with research on social class perception in English speech.