Social Priming in Speech Perception: Revisiting Kangaroo/Kiwi Priming in New Zealand English

We investigate whether regionally-associated primes can affect speech perception in two lexical decision tasks in which New Zealand listeners were exposed to an Australian prime (a kangaroo), a New Zealand prime (a kiwi), and/or a control animal (a horse). The target stimuli involve ambiguous vowels, embedded in a frame that would result in a real word with a KIT or a DRESS vowel and a nonsense word with the alternative vowel; thus, lexical decision responses can reveal which vowel was heard. Our pre-registered design predicted that exposure to the kangaroo would elicit more KIT-consistent responses than exposure to the kiwi. Both experiments showed significant priming effects in which the kangaroo elicited more KIT-consistent responses than the kiwi. The particular locus and details of these effects differed across experiments and participants. Taken together, the experiments reinforce the finding that regionally-associated primes can affect speech perception, but also suggest that the effects are sensitive to experimental design, stimulus acoustics, and individuals’ production and past experience.