Nhung Nguyen receives special mention for ICPhS paper

PhD student Nhung Nguyen (pictured) was recently singled out for special mention by the Association of Laboratory Phonology(opens in a new window) in the best student paper awards.

Nhung received a special mention for the paper she presented at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS)(opens in a new window), which was entitled "Affective attitudes towards Asians influence perception of Asian-accented vowels".

The Association for Laboratory Phonology is a non-profit organisation. The purpose of the association is to promote the scientific study of all aspects of the phonetics and phonology of spoken and signed languages through scholarly exchange across disciplines.

The association is an international body open to scholars world-wide, and is committed to the advancement and diffusion of knowledge on the phonetics and phonology of all human languages.

The abstract of Nhung's paper can be read below, and the full publication can be found here.(opens in a new window)

Previous studies have shown that speech perception can shift because of cognitive attitudes about the speaker, but little is known about affective attitudes in speech perception. In our study, we investigated how affective attitudes towards Asians relate to the perception of Asian-accented vowels by native Australian English listeners. Affective attitudes were assessed with an established scale from the social psychology literature adapted to our specific purpose. Vowel perception was assessed using a vowel categorization task. Results show that the degree of dis- like towards Asians negatively correlates with listeners' accuracy in vowel categorization. The results also provide evidence that cognitive attitudes elicit affective attitudes, and suggest the appropriateness of using social psychological tools to explicitly evaluate the role of affective attitudes in speech perception.