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Linguistic Profiling:Pilot Studies on Restaurants, Car Dealerships, and Apartment Rentals
Kedamai Fisseha, Nicolas Yannuzzi
Friday, January 12, 2007
We use a telephone audit study design to execute three pilot studies in which we test for discrimination based on auditory cues. Using two auditors, one speaking a dialect called  African American Vernacular English and another speaking Standard American English, we find that linguistic profiling is not a factor in obtaining a reservation at an elite New York restaurant and has very modest effects on the starting prices quoted at luxury car dealerships. However, we do find highly robust signs of racial discrimination based onauditory cues in the Boston and Cambridge apartment rental markets. The auditor speaking  African American Vernacular English was half as likely to receive a return call from arealtor and 1.67 times less likely to find available housing than the Standard American English auditor. Our availability findings are statistically significant at the .05 alpha level and yield a p-value of .039, suggesting that additional research needs to be done ondiscrimination in the Boston housing market. We also aggregated callback rates, which wereeven more significant,, with a p-value of .0067. We believe that the telephone audit designhas a significant place in social scientific experimental work on detecting discrimination.
 
Audit studies were developed by fair housing organizations in the late 1970’slooking to uncover discrimination inhousing markets.
i
The technique makes it possible to gauge discrimination in the actand for this reason has become a popular tool of researchers in the field. The audittechnique attempts to overcome thesignificant problem of confounding that plagued earlier discrimination research bystriving to eliminate as much non-racialdissimilarity between subjects as possible.
ii
 The weak points of an audit studydepend largely upon the type of contact thatis being utilized. One general problem isthat by nature, audit studies are not double- blind, so auditors may introduceidiosyncratic qualities to the experiment thatfavor a certain endpoint.
iii
Further,individual discrimination observed in anaudit study may not serve well as anindicator of market discrimination. These problems are addressable, however, throughcareful research and the utilization of a wide body of audit data. Generally, however,audit studies are characterized as quasi-experimental and give the researcher a gooddeal of power in assessing the types of treatment that different races face in themarket.
iv
Since its first use in ’79, the auditmethodology has been widely employed inan attempt to discern broadly the presence of discrimination. In 1987, George Galster collected fifty separate audit studies fromdifferent housing markets around the UnitedStates. In his analysis of the data, Galster used a conservative measure of racialdiscrimination and concluded that AfricanAmericans faced about a 50% chance of discrimination in the U.S. housing market.
v
 A more recent study of car dealerships also detected the presence of discrimination in the market, this timeagainst both African Americans and women.The data, collected by Ayres and Siegelmanfrom their study of over 300 paired audits atnew car dealers, showed, at a statisticallysignificant level, that African Americans andwomen were quoted higher final prices thanwhite men. Based upon these findings, theresearchers attempted to identify the reasonsthat dealers would be inclined todiscriminate. Their conclusion cited the possible presence of non-economic tastes for discrimination such as traditional animus or  bigotry and the use of statistical inference(by the car dealers) to generalize about a buyer's reservation price based on his/her gender or race. The researchers note that car sellers were probably inclined to infer a buyer’s reservation price through preconceived (race and gender linked)notions of consumer knowledgeability, theability to search, and openness to prolonged bargaining.
vi
 The astronomical time and monetarycosts associated with running audit studiesthat rely on personal contact has led socialscientists to pursue alternative audit studydesigns. Furthermore, some social scientistshave speculated that racial discriminationmight take place before the applicant and thediscriminator actually meet face to face.The discriminator may rely on auditory cuesfrom the applicant’s voice before visuallyobserving race. Discriminating over the phone might be a more efficient method of screening applicants that could allow thediscriminator to avoid the discomfort of rejecting the applicant in person.To test this hypothesis, socialscientists have increasingly used the tactic of  phone auditing. However, in instanceswhere telephone audits are the contactmethod of choice, the study is weakened bythe fact that auditors cannot convey their race over the telephone with absolutecertainty. Further, since the audit methodnecessarily stops a business transaction at anearly stage, it cannot gauge the presence of discrimination in later stages of the business2
 
deal. For example, a real estate agent who isopen to all phone calls, but discriminatesduring negotiations would not be detected inan audit study.
vii
Phone audits studies have been used mainly as a way to measure theimpact of racial auditory cues on the early-stage success of home buyers and apartmentseekers.In his research on housingdiscrimination in the San Francisco bayarea, Professor John Baugh has shown thatthe presence of an African AmericanVernacular English (AAVE) or a ChicanoEnglish (ChE) dialect can affect the abilityof an auditor to confirm an appointment for an apartment viewing.
viii
All of the phoneinterviews were conducted by Baugh, whowas able to effectively “code-switch,” or shift between dialects. Baugh and his fellowresearchers found that his trend was particularly prevalent in primarily White parts of San Francisco. In the Woodsideregion of San Franciso, the researchers showthat auditors speaking AAVE and ChE areless than half as likely as the auditorsspeaking SAE to confirm apartment viewingappointments. Results like these have beenan issue of contention for researchers and inthe court room where judges havehistorically been unable to form a consensusupon the complete viability of auditory cuesas a racial indicator.
ix
 In a 1999 University of Pennsylvaniastudy the presence of significantdiscrimination in the Philadelphia housingmarket was tested and confirmed.Implemented as part of a sociology course,the experiment utilized a multiracial groupof students that included native speakers of different dialects. The dialects includedStandard American English as well as twoothers, one the researches call Black Accented English (which is identical innature to African American Vernacular English), and another they deem Black English, which is often perceived as a signof poor socioeconomic status. Using thesedialects and also separating the students bygender, the researchers were able to design atelephone audit study to test the implicationsof vocal cues on housing availability. After collecting apartment listings from a widevariety of sources and executing 477 calls,they discovered a consistent gap in thesuccess rate of three types of auditors withrespect to housing ability and the ability toreach an agent. SAE auditors fared the bestwhile Black Accent English (or AAVE)auditors lagged behind, and Black Englishauditors faced the most discrimination.Their results further advance the idea thattelephone audit studies can be used as atenable means of discrimination researchand also pose further questions about thesignificance of speech as a racial cue.
x
Although telephone audit designshave shown consistent results uncoveringthe existence of linguistic profiling in thehousing market, only a few studies havedeeply discussed the differences between thevocal constitution or speech patterns of African Americans and Whites and how theyare manifested. If an untrained ear can notidentify race solely off of auditory cues in areliable fashion, then linguistic profiling cannot take place.Some phonetic or vocalcharacteristics are purely genetic since theydepend on the anatomical features of anindividual. Scientific evidence has shownthat there is very little vocal variation between African Americans and Whites.Anatomically, the African American andWhite vocal cords have been shown to behighly comparable.
xi
 Vocal tract length andvocal fold density, that control laryngealaerodynamics and acoustic characteristics,have not been shown to be significantlydifferent between the two racial groups.
xii
Inaddition, a study that took vocal samplesfrom African American and White male andfemale speakers, matched for age, height,3
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