Encoding and Decoding Mechanisms for Speakers’ Individual and Group Identities: A Social Psycholinguistics Perspective

How listeners quickly and effectively perceive speakers’ identity and personality in verbal communication remains a widely researched topic for social psycholinguistics.Traditional research focusing on the perception of between-speaker identity variation reported that the correct rate for between-speaker differentiation is subject to listeners’ phonological knowledge and speakers’ Fundamental Frequency (F0) and Vocal Tract Length (VTL).Recent research has found that speakers modulate their vocalisation strategies (language structure, language style and physiological basis of vocalisation) according to their changing communicative intentions, whereas listeners could adapt to within-speaker variations and recognise speakers’ identities.This article reviews the unique constraints on speaker identity encoding imposed by phonological rules and unpacks how underlying acoustic parameters characterise within-and between-speaker identity variations that influence speaker identity perception.It further introduces the concept of in-/out-group and explores how the phenomenon where speakers would adopt varied vocalisation strategies when motivated by group identity permutation intentions supports the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT).Based on such, it proposes Speaker Identity Encoding and Decoding Model for Verbal Interaction Scenarios and calls for future research in three directions.