Each of the articles assigned this week do a good job on building on each other. The initial article by Sumner introduces the idea that voice cues actually occur very early in the processing of the language. This initial information is important to understand, as it essentially means that accent and racial voice biases occur even before the parsing and comprehension of the sentence.
King and Sumner take this further, by showing that these biases do not just color our perceptions of the same understanding of the sentence, but in fact change our semantic interpretation. We actually parse the same words to have different meanings depending on who is speaking. Interestingly, this seemed natural and bizarre to think about. It is extremely concerning when one begins to consider the prejudicial implications involved
Sumner and Katoaka take a different approach, showing that it is very easy for a speaker to become primed and "used to" a new accent. There are cases of high false recall, especially in the NYC, but in my opinion this could be because of the sheer variety in NYC accents that are culturally dependent. The larger point that I took from this article was that it is not very difficult at all for speakers to pick up and understand new accents, mostly based around the priming of a few keywords. With that in mind, it is interesting that we maintain such strong prejudices against certain accents, given that it is often so easy for us to become used to them. The biases we have seem to then definitely be rooted in existing social/racial/gender divisions, they do not originate from language, language is merely a proponent of these social biases
King and Sumner take this further, by showing that these biases do not just color our perceptions of the same understanding of the sentence, but in fact change our semantic interpretation. We actually parse the same words to have different meanings depending on who is speaking. Interestingly, this seemed natural and bizarre to think about. It is extremely concerning when one begins to consider the prejudicial implications involved
Sumner and Katoaka take a different approach, showing that it is very easy for a speaker to become primed and "used to" a new accent. There are cases of high false recall, especially in the NYC, but in my opinion this could be because of the sheer variety in NYC accents that are culturally dependent. The larger point that I took from this article was that it is not very difficult at all for speakers to pick up and understand new accents, mostly based around the priming of a few keywords. With that in mind, it is interesting that we maintain such strong prejudices against certain accents, given that it is often so easy for us to become used to them. The biases we have seem to then definitely be rooted in existing social/racial/gender divisions, they do not originate from language, language is merely a proponent of these social biases
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