Female politicians and bias in speech processing

This week's readings left me wondering about the societal effects of subconscious bias in speech perception. If, as the Sumner paper on “Voice-specific effects in semantic association” argues, people have trouble processing words that seem inconsistent with a speaker's identity, how does this linguistic bias perpetuate stereotypes? Beyond the extreme example of people taking longer to process words when a man talks about putting on makeup versus a woman, it also seems that people's expectations of the types of words a certain gender or age might utter could lead to distrust. I think this issue could be very relevant to this year's presidential election. For example, how might people view a female presidential candidate talking about handling nuclear weapons when they have historically heard male politicians speak about weapons and foreign policy? People take longer to recognize words when they have different phonetic characteristics than when they learned them; it seems that this slight delay in recognition or processing could affect their positive or negative perceptions of Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.

Also, the Sumner paper on “effects of phonetically-cued talker variation on semantic encoding” pointed out that “social weighting” can result in disproportionately stronger encoding of pronunciations that don't necessarily correspond with global frequency weightings of the pronunciations. So even if there are many female politicians worldwide speaking about policy topics, if we grow up infrequently hearing this and instead hear predominantly males speaking about these topics, we might encode different semantic information related to these words. The other Sumner paper on social weighting of spoken words also discussed the bias that can be introduced in social weighting.

The paper on Condoleeza Rice delved into the issue of female politicians' speech. It seems that Condoleeza Rice probably overcame biases like unpredictable semantic associations with certain manners of speaking, by speaking in an “aregional” way - the authors point out that if her vowels suggest any regional identity, it is more Western than Southern. I found it interesting that the authors suggested that she may have accommodated the Californian pronunciation of “BAT” in her speech in California; this would probably overcome some of the phonetic cuing effects discussed in the Sumner papers. It would be easier for her listeners to understand the meaning of her words if she spoke in a manner similar to how they learned the words.