Accent = Homeless?

In this week’s readings, we learned how a speaker’s identity could affect how a listener interprets what they hear. In the Podevsa paper, the author examines Condoleezza Rice’s speech through analysis of her speech patterns and her historical background and biography. Podevsa concludes that Rice does not manifest the stereotypical speech patterns of a southern born and raised African American woman. Instead she uses Standard African American speech and combines it with a very enunciated and careful way of talking. This anomaly proves that Rice is forming a new identity for herself: one of a prestigious politician.

In Sumner, it is illustrated that biases and social representations are learned very early on in human life, which is good when proving that it is not experience that gives us biases when hearing speech, but it is also bad because it innately introduces us to discriminatory behavior. In Sumner and Kataoka, we learned how different accents affected how well listener’s were able to remember a word and its meaning. From the experiment, the authors concluded that people with General American accents were more likely to remember a word and its meaning if the words were spoken by another person with a General American or British English accent. In contrast, when they listened to people who possessed stereotypical New York City accents, they were less likely to recall a word’s meaning and whether or not it was said before. In Sumner and King, the authors depicted that phonetic voice characteristics impacted how people interpreted words semantically. For example, when listeners heard a male say the word “yeast,” they associated the word “bread” with it. On the other hand, when they heard a female say it, they associated the word “infection” with it. Clearly, the gender of the speaker affected how the listeners processed the word: with a male they thought about food, and with a female they thought about a problem that only occurs for women.

One part that I found very interesting was in Sumner where it described how landlords rent their apartments over the phone a lot more to people who have Standard American English accents compared to people who have Chicano or African American English accents. When my parents moved to the United States in the 1980’s, they had a very hard time trying to rent an apartment over the phone in Cupertino. They both spoke very broken and heavily Asian accented English at the time, and they now attribute their difficulty in finding an apartment to their accents. This proves that this phenomenon probably happens constantly and has made life for many immigrants harder than it already is. One reason that I believe that causes this is because landlords form prototypes, as described in Lupyan, where they picture a stereotypical Latino, African American, or Asian. Their prototypes probably have very bad English, and are therefore very hard to communicate with and end up being bad tenants, so landlords are less likely to rent them an apartment.