Association, Voice and Identity

I found this week’s readings heavily compelling because I’m most interested in the topic of sociolinguistics, and thought that the activity in class related well to the reading. Moreover, I felt that the activities and readings had a clear connection to real-world examples in terms of how we interact and perceive people, but also larger scale issues of truthfulness which impacts race and gender based discrimination. Whereas the Podesva paper focused on a single individual, Condoleeza Rice, to focus on sociolinguistic makeup and the Sumner and Kataoka paper discussed important topics such as how certain accents may affect the frequency of spoken word recognition, I am choosing to focus on the King and Sumner paper that discusses and explores the connections and intersections between associative priming, word recognition, and identity based voice. The first experiment in this paper detailed how listeners can have different semantic associations of a word based on the voice of how the word was spoken. In this instance, they chose an African-American man and a White American woman who spoke the list of 262 words, followed by individuals who utilized Amazon Mechanical Turk to input the word they associate the spoken word with. The results were a little bit surprising to me. 69.8% of respondents had the same top associate word, however, this means that 22.5% of respondents had differing words, depending on the speaker. There is no mention of the variety across differences because that is not within the scope of the paper, but I would be curious to look into research about how specific identity markers like gender, race and age may change the semantic associations of words. For example, something similar to how the activity/study we discussed on Friday where individuals with accents were noted to be less trustworthy. One way in which this topic would relate more to the real world is how interviews are conducted. For example, when interviewees are questioned, how much of their answers are connotated to associations that are not inline with the true representation of the interviewee, rather than the stereotypes those associations may contain.