Judging Before Understanding

In class this week, we looked at the study, Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010), which suggested that the voice characteristics of a talker do not influence comprehension and that attributes of reliability are made post-comprehension. However, the three studies I read for this week (King and Sumner (2015), Sumner (2015), and Sumner and Kataoka (2013)) provide evidence that challenges Lev-Ari and Keysar's conclusions.

King and Sumner (2015) shows that the way listeners respond to talkers is dependent on the talker. This finding that speaker-specific phonetic information affects our semantic interpretation of speech suggests that the voice characteristics of a talker do in fact influence comprehension—a conclusion completely at odds with Lev-Ari and Keysar's findings.

Sumner (2015) discusses how listeners form social representations of speakers quite early in the process of speech based on a speaker's voice cues. An important upshot this paper addresses is that the cognitive resources allocated to forming a social representation in response to voice cues can impact our ability to process and retain auditory information.

Sumner and Kataoka (2013) presents a challenge to frequency-based approaches to speech perception, finding data that supports the conclusion that listeners recognize speech equivalently despite the varying frequency of different accents (i.e. despite the different levels of familiarity the listener has with the accents used to produce the speech).

After reading these three studies, I would update the picture we created in class based on Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) to have social ratings much earlier in the order of the process of hearing a sentence. Intuitively, when we did this exercise in class, I found it surprising that social ratings should come so late in the process as I feel that people are often so quick to judge each other based on incomplete information.

Something I wish I knew more about is the process by which social judgments form (e.g. how exactly stereotypes become a part of our speech recognition process). I can see how having stereotypes might make sense in terms of needing a somewhat reliable way to update expectations about the world, but I would like to understand better how and why we try to fit people into stereotypes based on something as fragmented as a person's individual phonetic variation.

In terms of how these papers relate to the real world, they seem to draw a pretty compelling picture of people forming judgments about each other before understanding each other or hearing each other out. These findings have important implications as they suggest that a negative social judgment based on phonetic variation could lead to someone dismissing otherwise valid, important speech and  the converse situation in which a positive social judgment based on phonetic variation could lead to giving more attention and approval than someone's speech deserves. In simpler terms, one interpretation of these findings is that they help explain how pre-formed social judgments block people from understanding each other and giving each other his or her due attention and respect. One interpretation of the findings of these studies that it doesn't matter what people say if their listeners write them off before even hearing them out or understanding what they said. We need to address the pre-conceived notions and stereotypes people hang onto in order to work against the hate and discrimination they too often fuel.