How Much Can We Know About A Person Based on Language?

It is fascinating how much we can know (or think we know) about a person simply by the way 
they talk – this was a common theme amongst all of the readings.

In Professor Sumner's reading "The Social Weight of Spoken Words" (2015), a distinction is drawn between linguistic function and social function. Linguistic function is the literal sounds we make and the ideas behind them, while social function is the way that speech is received and reflected back on the speaker, and the biases – in one case, towards "prestigious"-sounding speakers – that arise from such a distinction. This dovetails nicely into King-Sumner's (2015) article, in which they discuss how listeners process the same word differently as spoken by people of different different voice characteristics of gender, race, etc.

This conflict of language as self-expression versus language as a mirror for societal-creation is given a concrete example in Podesva et al's (2012) analysis on the linguistic patterns of Condeleeza Rice. I was especially intrigued by this reading on Rice, which eventually concludes that Rice's speech:
• "avoids most avoids most regional features characteristic of the geographic areas in which she has lived"
• "exhibits features that index her high degree of education"
• "uses one feature associated with political conservatism" 
• "includes elements of Standard African American English" (78)
The upshot here is that from this alone, the authors would know that Rice is a "conservative, 
professional African American." Here, we see a clear-cut example of identity being formed by
language, and vice versa – different linguistic trademarks tell us about the speaker, and the speaker
reinforces those trademarks by furthering their use.

What I'm interested in exploring further after these readings are the psycholinguistics of it all – from
the point of view of both the speakers and the listeners. As speakers, what goes on in the brain to 
internalize, linguistically, the different aspects of our identities? And as listeners, where do our linguistic
biases against certain races or genders originate in the brain?