What needs to be done

      In Professor Meghan Sumner’s “The social weight of spoken words”, she offers an overview on the cues that individuals receive from spoken words that, thereby, inform social biases. Variation in speech can inform gender, age, race, social status, ethnicity, and more. Professor Sumner explains that this is a “dynamic process”; even further, that this process can determine the investment individuals place in a conversation and the cognitive resources allocated. She details the idea of “social weighting” and how strongly encoded words can have lasting impacts, even though we often mimic weekly encoded words that appear far more times throughout development (the “center” vs “cenner” example).

      In Professor Sumner’s “Voice-specific effects in semantic association”, she and Ed King discuss the lack of empirical research proving that voice impacts not only the recognition of words, but also the interpretation of words. Placing the word “nurse”, for example, after “doctor” instead of “bread” would lead to faster recognition. However, would a man, instead of a woman, saying the word “clothes” lead to a different interpretation of the word? Using free association and semantic printing instead of something such as eye tracking, Professor Sumner and King conducted two experiments. In the 1st, they studied how the voice of a speaker influences semantic association and, in the 2nd, reaction times.

      Lastly, in Robert Podesva’s “Condoleezza Rice and the sociophonetic construction of identity”, he dives into Rice herself and how her multifaceted background influences her speech— specifically her “vowel, consonant, and rhythm patterns” (66). Interestingly, beyond just her Southern, Western, and African American background, they also looked into her conservative and politician status. For example, they found that she did not exhibit the “PIN-PEN merger” found commonly in the Southern and African American speech, perhaps due to her Western, conservative, and political background.

      I thought many of the readings today illuminated the amount of research still left to be done. In Professor Sumner’s work, she explained the lack of empirical research on something many assumed to be true, and how she stepped in to fill the gap. Podesva likewise explains, “the amount of research on Standard African American English is dwarfed by the large body of scholarship on African American Vernacular English” (78). Much work needs to be done to account for the growing presence of African Americans in the political realm, for example, and currently that is not being provided.

      I also thought Professor Sumner’s overview on how speech influences social biases definitely also expands to sexual orientation. The idea of the “gay voice” most certainly can lead to the same judgements and lack of cognitive resources placed similarly to race, gender, and ethnicity. Thinking about this made me look into the massive amount of literature and research done on sexual orientation’s influence on speech variation, and how much more there is within linguistics itself.