This week’s readings were an interesting survey on how we listen and why. The most remarkable thing to me was that our divergent ways of listening to speakers appears to be subconscious. The example given in Professor Sumner's shorter paper (about the Physicist) was a clear, simple one, but in ways also was a conscious example. More troubling was the idea that the voice cues we pick up on systematically change the way we attend to speech and influence the cognitive resources we devote, all without our conscious awareness.
Sumner and Kataoka’s 2013 paper looked at the ways phonetic variation (different ways of saying words) affected recognition and recall. They found that true/false recall rates from research participants differed based off of the speaker’s accent, suggesting that listeners were really just listening for the gist of NYC speech, while when listening to British English or General American English, we remember individual words.
Sumner and King’s 2015 paper made a related point- speaker characteristics not only change the resources we devote to speakers, but also the way we listen to words and what we listen for. The paper showed that listeners associate certain voices with certain words more than others (Male J’s voice saying yeast was associated more with bread, while female M’s voice saying yeast was associated with “infection.”)
This week’s readings have made me think about comedy. Some suggest that we laugh, or think things are humorous, when they defy some sort of expectation we hold. Perhaps one of the reasons people enjoyed videos like “kid President” were because we don’t expect a young child to give such motivational advice. The child's words defied the expectations we had built up from different phonetic cues. Further, the popular show of the early 2000’s “Kids say the darndest things” may have been so popular in part because the videos recorded children saying things we don’t expect them to say. A funny example can be found in the first 5 seconds of this Youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUm7RHi_6rU
I really enjoyed reading your blog especially the examples you provided in the last paragraph. I also found the idea of voice cues changing the way we attend to speech and how we allocate our cognitive resources troubling. I have been interviewing for summer internships in the past few weeks and having done the readings made me realize that I might be at a disadvantage compared to other equally qualified candidates who don't have a thick foreign accent (Iranian accent) like me. I have come to question the validity of oral interviews and have come to believe in written interviews. I think the interviewing process for most companies is flawed and should be reevaluated.
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