Does Race Modulate Neural Synchrony During Language Comprehension?

Abstract

This experiment tested whether race modulates neural synchrony between people. In our study, we had participants from Suny Purchase College listen to 10 different audio stories, half happy, half sad. We wanted to measure the arousal levels of each participant as they listened to each story, so we used a Biopac Student Lab to record the skin conductance levels of each participant as each story unfolded. We made the same measurements in the story tellers. After listening to each audio story, participants were asked what they perceived the racial identity of the speaker to be. We correlated skin conductance levels between speaker and listener for each story and tested whether those correlations depended on either the racial or gender congruency between the storyteller and listener. We found that there was no significant effect of race or gender congruence in this small sample, but there were trends in the data that suggested that synchrony between speaker and listener was most robust in the same race and same gender conditions. There needs to be more research done to understand how personal identities can influence the neural synchrony between people in naturalistic communication.