A Necessary Evil

This week’s readings by Meghan Sumner, Ed King, and Reiko Katoaka discussed topics such as social weight, semantic priming, and semantic encoding. Of the papers I read, all three tied together the idea that the manner and context in which words are said affect our language associations. A person’s manner of speech can be affected by dimensions such as their age, gender, and place of birth. An example of the effect of context would be a child, due to their parents’ efforts, deeply encoding the pronunciation of “center” with a hard “t” as opposed to the more common silent-t pronunciation. As we listen to various people throughout the course of our lives, we tend to mentally cluster people who speak in a similar manner. When we listen to someone who we believe belongs to a particular cluster, our biases associated with said cluster eventually arise. As optimistic as it might be to think that this is a process which occurs after spoken language has already been processed, Sumner’s The Social Weight of Spoken Words argues for the opposite: “voice cues activate social representation fast and early during the process of spoken language understanding”. Similar to the way in which a speaker’s voice primes us to assume certain social characteristics, the sequencing of words can also prime us to preconceive “target” words before the speaker has even said them.

            What I have gathered from these readings is that it would appear our quick and early activation of social representation during language processing is a necessary result of the way in which the human brain has evolved to deal with language. From a survivability standpoint, the brain is fairly efficient at discerning language differences. Having the ability to recognize, or at the very least perceive, that someone has come from a different background certainly must have had an evolutionary advantage with regard to in-group and out-group dynamics. The argument, as I see it, has never been that humans stereotype other humans based on spoken language because they are inherently evil, but because it allows us to assume information that eventually may or may not become useful. Although stereotypes may arise due to the way in which the brain has optimized language processing, it is important to correct these stereotypes whenever possible and recognize that while natural to have, stereotypes are not meant to color the entirety of one’s interactions with other people. More curiously, I wonder how language itself and interactions between people might change if we could somehow eliminate features such as semantic priming and social weight from our natural language processing.