Alternative information in speech

This week I read, in addition to the TICS article, the King/Sumner paper and the Sumner/Kataoka paper. Sumner’s TICS paper examines perception of speakers based on their language, and how language used affects our interpretations of what was said, and extends beyond that through lasting association. As a British student, this is article is something that I can very much relate to. In fact, I was once told by a Professor at Stanford that, when making presentations, I should attempt to exploit my accent and the different reaction that my listeners would have.

The King Sumner paper delves further into the relationship between linguistic and social information, and the impact that variation in speech has on the two. The paper found that both free association and semantic priming tasks resulted in findings of significant effects of speaker-specific word association. An interesting analysis provided in the conclusion notes that the subjects of the experiment might have had more familiarity with one participant, a younger white woman, than with an older African-American man.

The third paper I studied was the Sumner Kataoka paper. This paper looks at recognition of language in regards to variable productions of the words. For me, the most interesting observation of this study was the lures (false recall) that occurred amongst participants. The study predictably notes that increased attention paid results in increased semantic priming and decreased false recall rates. Ultimately, the three readings raise an important conversation of the multi-faceted information provided within speech, and the importance of these various types of information in contributing to our understanding.