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Research in social speech perception has demonstrated that information about a speaker's native language status, whether delivered explicitly via instructions (Jiang & Kennison, 2022) or implicitly through visual cues (Rubin, 1992; Gnevsheva, 2018), influences speech processing.
Existing literature focuses on how native speakers perceive non-native features, leaving a gap in understanding nonnative speakers' perception of L2 phonetic variables based on talker language background. The proposed study addresses this gap by investigating how L2 sequential bilinguals' voicing stop boundaries reflect expectations about a talker's L1.

We focus on two groups: (1) native Russian speakers and (2) native Mandarin speakers, both of which arrived in an English-speaking country after age 18. For voiceless stops, Russian exhibits a short-lag VOT (18ms to 39ms) (Ringen & Kulikov, 2012), Mandarin shows a long-lag VOT (82ms to 92 ms) (Chao et al., 2008), and English falling between these ranges (58 ms to 80ms) (Lisker & Abramson, 1964). Examining these two groups enables us to observe VOT perceptual shifts from both directions. Additionally, prior research indicates that English listeners struggle with perceiving and imitating reduced VOT (Nielsen, 2011; Nielsen & Scarborough, 2015). By examining groups with consistently different VOT ranges in their L1 phonology, we explore cross-linguistic perception of shorter VOTs.

We conduct an experiment using a modified visual analog scale (VAS) paired with social cues to assess listeners' judgments of the sounds /pa/-/ba/, /ta/-/da/, /ka/-/ga/. Social cues are operationalized using images: an Asian male face for the Chinese guise, a White male face for the Russian guise, and a Black male face for the American guise. The study employs 18 synthesized CV syllables with varying VOT (-70 to 90 ms) across bilabial, alveolar, and velar stops, generated from original tokens produced by a native English speaker and manipulated using Praat (Boersma & Weenik, 2024) Participants undergo two phases: In the baseline phase, participants hear each syllable three times in random order, with bilabial, alveolar, and velar stops presented in separate counterbalanced blocks, with no social guise. They then click to indicate where they perceive the voicing contrast on the continuum.

In phase two, participants perform the same listening task once for each of the three social guises, the order of which is counterbalanced across participants. For each guise, an image and basic information are displayed at the center of the screen. We conduct the experiment using PsychoPy2 (Version 2024.1.0; Pierce et al., 2019). We use normalized click location values to compare how evaluations of the voicing contrast vary as a function of the manipulated social guise we manipulate. We expect that the presence of social guise to influence listeners’ activation of the corresponding phonology, altering their level of sensitivity to VOT nuances and affecting judgment on voicing contrast.

Results will advance understanding of how bilingual language processing interacts with social knowledge, which has implications for language teaching, cross-cultural communication, and speech technology in multilingual settings.