I love British Accents

In Dr. Sumner’s paper on discrimination and accent-differences, I found her comment about listening to the physicist lecture particularly interesting. This idea of social weighting fascinates me—how our ability to relate to a speaker or our assumed “prestige” of the speaker actually changes our auditory processing of the speech event. This immediately strikes me as a very socially ingrained form of classism, racism, and prejudice. One of the most interesting biases that arises with accents is the assumption that so many American people make that Southern Standard British English speakers are more intelligent and more prestigious—something I find fascinating give our history of declaring independence from Britain. I wonder if this same prestigious bias existed earlier in American history and British English was favored over the American accent.

Listeners’ ability to understand spoken words given massive variation in pronunciation is quite amazing. It reminds me of how given different lighting and shadows, humans can still identify accurate colors, even though the actual variation in colors being seen is massive (for example: on a white wall with gray shadows), and understand that the wall is continuously white. In the Sumner and Kataoka study, the researchers found that native GA speakers recalled spoken words from within-accent voices and British English voices at approximately the same rate, but false recalled spoken words (as in thought words had been spoken that had not been) for NYC-accent speakers about 50% more often than with the other two accents. I think it’s interesting that gist-encoding is modulated by a lack of attention, and that this could be the reason that the participants paid more attention to the within-accent speakers as well at the British English speakers. It’s striking that we’ve somehow become so conditioned to be attentive to British English over other accents, and I really want to know more about this sociolinguistic phenomenon. I personally find myself wildly attracted to people with British accents.

The King and Sumner paper focuses on semantic differences in interpretation of different speakers. The researchers used a word association task to understand if different speakers trigger different responses in word association tasks based on varying vocal characteristic differences. The fact that people respond in different ways to spoken words depending on vocal characteristics of the speaker is so fascinating to me, and continues the thread throughout these assigned papers that the characteristics we can gather about someone based on their voice changes the way we process the information, which has some potentially very discriminatory implications. I will now think twice about fawning over British accents in the future, because I know about our subconscious bias to certain accents and other vocal characteristics and how they affect our assumptions about the speaker.