Speaking Race or Racialized Speaking: Evidence from Perceptions of Lateral Variants by Puerto Rican Listeners

Abstract:In this study we show that the perception of lateral variants by Puerto Rican listeners changes according to who the listener believes is speaking. Puerto Rican listeners heard sentences with target words featuring either rhotic [ɾ] or lateral [l] (amo[ɾ] – amo[l]) codas, a sociophonetic alternation that is common in Puerto Rican Spanish. Across four conditions characterized by the presence or absence of social cues, listeners judged speakers on five Likert items: honesty, intelligence, SES, work ethic, and pleasantness. Condition 1 included only the sociophonetic variant while conditions 2, 3 and 4 included information about speaker nationality (flag, either Puerto Rican or Dominican), or racial phenotype (pictures of people) or both nationality and racial phenotype. The results revealed that for the sociophonetic variant only condition (no additional speaker information), listeners rated the lateral variant more negatively. However, for the three conditions where speaker information was provided, ratings were significantly affected by listeners’ perception of racial phenotype and nationality, with almost no interaction with phonetic variant. These results suggest that what was a significant effect for sociophonetic variant (condition 1) was overshadowed by perceptions of speaker racial phenotype and nationality. In other words, racialized speaking matters.