The Sumner TICS paper discusses how we glean much more from speech than just what is being said. As listeners, we often subconsciously process a speaker's race, gender, age, level of experience (as when a child hears a parent correcting their speech), etc. As I understood it, the Sumner/Kataoka paper found that General American English speakers are almost just as good at recalling words spoken by British English speakers as they are at recalling words spoken by fellow General American English speakers, creating an equivalence between the two dialects. This equivalence does not, however, hold for General American English and New York City English. Sumner and Kataoka go on to suggest that the equivalence between General American English and British English might be caused by a "strong encoding" of British English despite a relatively small sample size. And last but not least, the Sumner/King paper explored whether listeners interpret words differently depending on what voice they're spoken in. Sumner and King found that there is more disagreement about which word is most closely associated with another for two different speakers than for an individual speaker. They also discovered that there was no real difference (at least for one speaker) in response time for mismatched "top associations" based on the two voices in the experiment.
These readings all tie into the idea that there is much more that goes on behind the scenes when we hear speech than we realize. I started to get a sense of this in class, but I didn't realize that there is so much to learn about even a subfactor of speech interpretation like accents. Evidently, accents are so powerful that they change the way we associate words with each other and even how we remember what people say! I wonder whether we judge writing in the same way we judge speech. I for one often find myself making assumptions about a writer just by reading the style in which his/her book, Facebook post, blog comment, etc., is written. For example, if a piece of writing is riddled with grammatical errors, I often assume the writer is a nonnative speaker (which leads to a similar set of judgments that people make about speakers). The Sumner/Kataoka paper in particular reminded me of when I helped a Chinese-born friend with his college essay. I recall having a much harder time processing my friend's Chinese American English college essay than I did processing another friend's British English essay. The essays were probably comparably well-written, but I came off with a much less positive feeling after struggling to grasp my Chinese American friend's essay in full than I did with my British friend's essay. There was recently a big controversy about Asian American students being treated unfairly in the college admissions process. I wonder whether part of the explanation for this could be explained by a subconscious linguistic bias on the part of admissions officers when they read college essays.
Hey David,
ReplyDeleteThese are really insightful points about writing style and biases that I didn't even consider. They make me wonder if whether something is handwritten in addition to containing certain grammatical errors triggers an additional layer of social representation in the reader. While graphology remains largely controversial and difficult to prove, I wonder if people unconsciously make assumptions, true or otherwise, about others based on the way in which they write in addition to the syntax of their writing.
I also wondered whether the same biases come into play when we are interpreting writing instead of speech. Does writing strip out some of the social cues that cause subconscious bias? Does it come with its own set of social cues (like punctuation style, for example) that subconsciously affect our assumptions about the writer and the way we interpret their words? Writing seems like it might reduce some sources of implicit bias. However, having less context can cause a different set of issues. Writing is easier to misinterpret that speech, and makes it harder to convey emotion. Furthermore, lack of information about the writer might lead readers to overemphasize any information they do know, or assume, about the writer. I think this is an especially important topic because of the recent rise of online communication.
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