Names, Accents, and Racial Linguistic Profiling: Linguistic and Racial Prejudice as Mechanisms of Discrimination Against Speakers of African American Vernacular English

Abstract

Linguistic judgment refers to the process through which listeners attempt to fill in information about unknown speakers and situations by referencing prior knowledge or experiences pertaining to a speaker’s accent or speech patterns. While linguistic judgment is a useful and nearly universal process, linguistic profiling, a specific type of linguistic judgment where assumptions of a speaker’s internal traits are made based on perceived associations between speech patterns (i.e. accent) and social group membership, has the potential to facilitate misconceptions and prejudicial judgments where negative stereotypical traits of a larger social group are linked to individual speakers. In the case of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a non-standard vernacular of American English, linguistic profiling of AAVE speakers can lead to assumptions of African American racial identity, and attributions of (frequently negative) racial stereotypes of African Americans towards individual AAVE speakers. Discrimination against and prejudice towards speakers of AAVE has been demonstrated in many settings, including in early education, housing searches, and job searches. As well, linguistic profiling has been suggested as a gateway for racial prejudice into legal proceedings, such that linguistic profiling biases reception of testimony given by AAVE speakers, or more broadly given by African Americans. Crucially, linguistic profiling can still play a role in prejudicial judgments when race is visible (e.g. in in-person settings), as the instrumental role of assumptions of social group membership in personality attribution does not need to be conscious to listeners (e.g. “this person sounds like they’re ___”), and speech is considered by many to be socially acceptable justification for judgments, where race is not. Two original experiments are conducted to directly investigate whether AAVE speakers are judged more negatively than speakers of the standard dialect in the US, Standard American English (SAE), in personality dimensions pertaining to perceived credibility, a personality dimension applicable to the subjective judgments made when evaluating legal testimony. In the first experiment, AAVE and SAE speech were presented alone as “excerpts from interviews” with different speakers; in the second experiment the same samples were presented as paired with “speaker names”, chosen and normed as strongly linked to perceptions of either African American or white racial identity. In both experiments separately, and comparing the two, there was a persistent positive effect of SAE accent on ratings. That is, AAVE speakers were consistently rated more negatively than SAE speakers, with or without pairings with names and regardless of the racial identity associated with name pairings. The results are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that racial linguistic profiling leads to judgments of AAVE speakers as less credible than SAE speakers (who prior research attests are profiled as racially white). Applications of these results to understanding the role of racial prejudice in the American legal system will be discussed.