How do we make sense of pragmatic expectations that might come with different social identities, especially when these expectations might conflict? In my main vein of work, I draw off of conclusions from Beltrama and Schwarz (2024), which finds that numerals uttered by individuals portraying a nerdy persona are perceived as more precise than individuals portraying a non-nerdy (chill) persona. The authors found that their characters evoked different expectations of precision, depending on their personae. Crucially, these characters were all white! Bucholtz (1999, 2001) proposes that Nerdiness comes packaged with expectations of whiteness as a result of both superstandard, hypercorrect English and the rejection of non-standard speech practices like African American English. However, we do know that Black Nerds exist and that Black speech is particularly stigmatized, often as being unintelligent and unreliable (e.g. Rickford & King 2016). Thus, in this work, we asked whether Blackness in our characters would produce a contrast between pragmatic judgments for Nerds and non-Nerds, like what was found in Beltrama and Schwarz (2024). Furthermore, given prejudices against Blackness and Black speech, we questioned whether Black characters would receive lower precision expectations than their white counterparts.

Ultimately, we found that Black Nerds did not receive significantly more precision judgments than Black non-Nerds. Additionally, we found that Black characters, on the whole, received more precision judgments than the white characters in Beltrama and Schwarz (2024). Race and persona do interact, but not in predictable ways! Our main theory is that imprecise speech may be risky and that this risk is compounded upon by Blackness because of pre-existing stereotypes and racial prejudices. This proposed risk effect may be combined with an effect of persona, such that the differences between the characters with respect to judgments of precision appear to be balanced out. Crucially, we see here that pragmatic processing is sensitive to not just differences in social character type, but race, also.

The striking effect of race on how persona mediates expectations of precision prompted a key question: If two things are happening when participants are reasoning about both race and persona in our task, can we catch this happening online?

From the results of the previous study, we questioned whether a persona effect may be masked or mediated by differential ideas of how risky imprecise speech is for Black Nerds vs. Black Chill individuals. Thus, we re-ran the initial Covered Screen task, but this time measured the percentage of looks to a presumed precise referent.

The results of this eye-tracking study revealed that a two-fold process was taking place, but for Black characters only; participants first showed more looks to our Covered Screen (presumed precise referent) for both Black and White Nerds. After this first phase, however, looking patterns flipped for Black characters, with the Chill character now receiving more looks to the Covered Screen than their Nerdy counterpart.

From these results, we conclude that a persona effect is coming into play, initially, and influencing participants’ online processing, regardless of the speaker’s race. However, the flip in looking patterns for Black characters suggests that there is something race-based that comes into effect later on, obscuring this initial persona-based attentional draw.