The effects of ethnic bias and face on identification, accentedness judgements and intelligibility of Cantonese accents in Hong Kong

Social information such as a talker's ethnicity, gender, and age are found to affect accent perception and attitudes. While existing research primarily focuses on English-dominant communities, this study aims to fill the gap by examining the impacts of ethnic bias and face on three Cantonese accents in Hong Kong. Nine groups of 20 Hong Kong Cantonese listeners were exposed to three Cantonese accents (i.e., Hong Kong local Cantonese, Mandarin-accented, and English-accented Cantonese) in three conditions of visual cues (i.e., a silhouette, a South Asian face and a White face). For accent identification, seeing a South Asian face in a mismatch condition led to more errors compared to seeing a White face in the same condition. For intelligibility, an enhancement of intelligibility was found when the face and accent were misaligned (e.g., an English accent matched with a South Asian face), supporting the general adaptation mechanism instead of the expectation mechanism. We argue that listeners might perceive South Asian and White faces as the same broad social category "foreigners/outgroup members," resulting in a similar enhancement effect in the aligned and misaligned conditions. A dual-activation mechanism is proposed to account for the complementary effect of phonological and visual cues on accent perception.