Social Evaluation of Artificial Agents by Language Varieties

In Sociolinguistics, language attitude studies based on natural voices have provided evidence that human listeners socially assess and evaluate their communication partners according to the language variety they use. Similarly, research on intelligent agents has demonstrated that the degree an artificial entity resembles a human correlates with the likelihood that the entity will evoke social and psychological processes in humans. Taking the two findings together, we hypothesize that synthetically generated language varieties have social effects similar to those reported from language attitude studies on natural speech. We present results from a language-attitude study based on three synthetic varieties of Austrian German. Our results on synthetic speech are in accordance with previous findings from natural speech. In addition, we show that language variety together with voice quality of the synthesized speech bring about attributions of different social aspects and stereotypes and influence the attitudes of the listeners toward the artificial speakers.