The most interesting part about this weeks readings, brought to light by the piece "The social weight of spoken words" was realizing the extent to which the world is shaped by perception of speech, and how the variation in speech acts as an informational source about the world. The knowledge this provides permeates nearly all fields I am interesting in learning about- society, history and culture.
What really struck out to me about this perception in speech variation was the idea of how we internalize it, such as through the physicist example posed by Professor Sumner. The idea that cognitive facilities are tuned to absorb the details of variation in social behavior in this person was intriguing to me, as it relates so heavily to how we try to emulate people who we aspire to be like in absolutely any way- career, life, even dressing. It hints to the perception that all investment bankers sound the same, all politicians appear the same, and even validates that generalization to a large extent.
I was further intrigued to learn the analysis of accents in the "Effects of phonetically-cued talker variation on semantic encoding" paper. Since I went to an international school, accents were a huge part of identity, as students from all over South Asia- Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, India, Hong Kong etc. came to study at my school, and the intricate ways their accents differed from each other was both analyzed and thought about extensively. As a whole, we became accustomed to all these different accents, but this paper made me think a lot about how GA listeners would perceive these different accents and which ones they would find harder to follow. This idea would be interesting to explore further in the context of phonetic cues, and include in the experiment conducted in the "Voice Specific Effects in Semantic Association" paper, especially taking into account the key variables mentioned in this paper- age, race, dialect and gender.
No comments:
Post a Comment