Idioms, Idiosyncrasies, and Identity,

The three articles that I read for this week – “The social weight of spoken words” (Sumner), “Voice-specific effects in semantic association” (King/Sumner), and “Condoleezza Rice and the sociophonetic construction of identity” (Podesva) – construct a solid and informative platform for the sociolinguistic content to which we were introduced this past week. Collectively, the articles illustrate that semantic meaning varies depending on the expected social connotations of the speaker; King and Sumner explain the concept by saying that upon “hearing the word princess spoken by an adult with a British accent, people will probably think of a member of the real-life Royal Family; when hearing princess spoken by an American child, they may think of a fictional Disney character” (King/Sumner 1).

The Sumner article establishes that “variation in speech is not random” (Sumner 1), but more than that, “variation provides information about… a talker’s age, gender, accent, emotion, and style” (Sumner 1). Furthermore, this information does not inform a listener’s processing later in the conversation, but early in the interaction, as humans “automatically map co-present cues in speech” (Sumner 1), evidenced by a study in which experimenters recorded the biased responses of lessors to varying voice guises asking about an open apartment. Not only is such prejudice evidenced every time I hear my conservative grandparents berate a non-native English speaker’s accent, but also in my own international travels; despite, for instance, speaking English with other native speakers in the United Kingdom, my excitement upon coming across another American derives from the assumption that we have common experiences.

Building upon this base, the King/Sumner article explains that “hearing a woman say a word activates all exemplars produced by women” (King/Sumner 1), meaning that as soon as you hear someone of a certain social category say a word, your brain automatically digs up every word that you subconsciously associate with that category. King and Sumner corroborate this assertion with data by performing two experiments; in Experiment 1, the authors “addresse[d] the question of whether listeners interpret a given word as having different semantic associations depending on the voice of the speaker” (King/Sumner 2). In doing so, they ascertained that “22.5% of prompts resulted in different top associates [(words that are the most common responses to a given prompt)], depending on the speaker” (King/Sumner 3).

Such findings are extremely interesting in the context of Condoleezza Rice, the primary vehicle for studying the linguistic construction of public identity. As a hugely public figure, she’s likely conscious of how her identity informs her speech and vice versa ­– how her speech constructs the identity that others perceive: “the particular features that Rice uses within this set will shed light on which aspects of her identity are salient in the construction of her public persona” (Podesva 3).  I don’t think I’ve ever been so deliberate in my own verbal construction of my identity, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t formed opinions of others based on what identity markers they produce; as is said in “The social weight of spoken words,” “all experiences with spoken language are not treated equally.”