As we saw in class this week with the Key and Peele sketch, with the audio file in the problem set, in Professor Sumner's piece about word's social weight, and in the other readings for this week, our absorbing of information through speech is not usually about what is actually said, but who said it and how they said it. Although this can often be a helpful tactic to provide ourselves context of the speaker, it can also perpetuate stereotypes by focusing too much on pre-existing biases. When encoding speech, we pay attention to the speaker's age, gender, action, emotion, and style.
Several responses and questions I had in response to these readings ("Social Weight of Spoken Words," "Voice Specific Effects in Semantic Association," "Condoleezza Rice and the Sociophonetic Construction of Identity) were related to how we can make our speech less polarizing, but moreover, how can we train our minds to make more neutral, and less possibly discriminatory, interpretations. Condoleezza Rice is obviously a world leader, but she also seems to be a model speaker because her diverse identity actually seems to be an ideal blend to lead to almost neutral patterns, reaching all groups she relates to. However, the conclusion of the paper stated that she often avoids strong regional features...I am curious if this is her organic speech just from her background or if she has deliberately adjusted some of her speech to be less region specific. That may sound absurd at first, but not at all with more thought. With how much public speeches are practiced and analyzed, it is absolutely possible to fine tune those details. The relationship between her speech and her background is still interesting to me, because instead of using several speech patterns that are specific to different regions, she instead goes for neutral speech. I feel that in this analysis, the background about the speaker shines through more. Would a person who had a less diverse background be praised as a neutral speaker or criticized for being a bland speaker?
Even as I am writing this, it is difficult to differentiate between the speaker's characteristics and the listener's interpretation to the speakers characteristics. For instance, the example that compares hearing a man and a woman say yeast would lead to dramatically different responses of bread and yeast. I am sure these different responses are not always damaging, and in the spirit of individualism, it seems impossible for their to be one 'correct' answer, but how do we make our brain react more neutrally to words?
I think exposure helps. Just as educating someone about the possibility of stereotype threat can help them improve their performance in tasks that may connect with a stereotype about them, we must be aware of our brains and our society's habit to rely so heavily on biases.
I liked your comments regarding the cause of Rice’s neutral accent. I think we could determine to what degree she controls her own speaking mannerisms by analyzing samples of her speech in informal situations (e.g., in a non-politically-orientated conversation with a friend). Podesva touched briefly on this idea when he compared Rice’s habits during the speech during her habits during the question and answer session; he found differences, but they were not particularly strong, which could indicate that Rice’s neutrality is mostly natural. Of course, the question and answer section doesn’t represent a totally informal situation, but it was the closest we could get to one in this study. It would certainly be an interesting topic to look further into.
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