Answers May Vary

(Articles Chosen: Sumner and Kataoka, Sumner, King and Sumner)

The three articles authored or co-authored by Sumner all dealt with the topic of variation in phonetic information and how differences in speech production – between individuals and between entire accented populations – can influence recognition.

Sumner and Kataoka studied participants who had to recall and recognize words produced by speakers falling into different categories of accented English: General American (GA), New York City (NYC), and Southern Standard British English (BE). The study found that speakers of GA recalled and recognized the words of GA and BE speakers with minimal difference. The researchers suggest then that frequency may not be the best indicator of how humans internalize phonetic events, and that less frequent, but more emphasized, experiences of linguistic events become socially weighted and result in similarly robust representations.

The discussion of social weight continues in Sumner’s 2015 article, which opens talking about just how variable and multi-faceted speech production is, and how the nuances relay valuable information about the speaker. The listener then encodes differently – consciously or unconsciously – the words of the speaker based on this perceived phonetic information, causing phenomena in which a listener may only be able to remember the gist of the words and not the words verbatim because of their subjective experience with the linguistic cues – social cues that are activated earlier than one might like and have discriminatory consequences.

King and Sumner continued to study the variation in speech production through free association and semantic priming, looking at the role of phonetic information specific to individual speakers in listener interpretation and how variation in speech cues word recognition, finding that single words prompt significant differences in responses between two speakers that vary in age, race, and gender.

The readings make me wonder if there is an “optimal” voice for a professor to have to optimize retention by students. Personally, I find that I pay more attention to and give more authority to male professors with British accents, although now I will have to see if there are actually any significant effects on my learning. I tend to remember verbatim professors that either sound like me or have very distinct or “odd” voices.