Sub-project 4 “Instrumental approaches to perceptions of spoken and written modes of hate speech”

Sub-project 4 investigates how various social groups’ judge and are affected by expressions of hate speech.

Three questions are addressed:

1. Where does hate speech begin, i.e. where do language users draw the line between the acceptable and unacceptable in social media environments?
2. Is the perception of hate speech similar across written and spoken language?
3. Do judgements depend on whether hate speech is read or heard, i.e. is hate speech solely a matter of the words that are used, or does prosody come into play as well, even to the extent that it can become more important than the utterance’s lexico-grammatical structure?

These questions are approached through an innovative multiple methods design that combines implicit and explicit instrumental measurements as well as quantitative and qualitative analyses.