Perceiving Before Listening

The connection between phonetic variation and the way that both speakers and listeners understand each other is the main thread connecting these three readings. Sumner begins with an overview of this idea. She states that speech cues sounds and words but also talkers and their social attributes. Thus, as soon as someone even says one word, the listener already has access to information about them just through the variation of their speech. Interestingly though, while speech may be variable, this variation is not random. The variation in speech and who the listener is both effect how information is received. Sumner also posits that these cues are activated at the beginning. Variation thus allows speakers to create style and identity.

            For me, one of the intriguing aspects of the paper came from the example of a physicist talking. For a listener who is deeply engrossed in learning physics and sees a potential career in the field, the talk is much more memorable. The person will remember specific words and phrases stated. On the other hand, for a listener who isn’t particularly interested in the field, the talk is remembered only by the gist of what is said, and not by the actual words. This, to me, raises interesting questions about the concept of memory. Do we only truly internalize something if we are interested and invested in it? If I am not that engaged with one of my classes, will I only ever remember the gist of what is said, and the specifics will slip my mind? These questions seem to interplay directly with linguistics issues.

            The second article I read, a collaboration between King and Sumner, built on the ideas Sumner first explored. Mainly, Sumner discusses the phenomenon where users utilize specific phonetic cues when recognizing different voices. The concept of semantic priming works. Thus, words spoken by different voices give different impressions. These voice characteristics give context to the words. For me, Sumner and King’s assertion actually raises interesting questions about gender. In contrast to the example of the physicist, in this case, it is the connotations associated with the speaker’s voice, rather than the listener’s interest, that intrigues me. When the participants heard the word yeast, they identified the second word that came to their minds differently based on the gender of the speaker. For the woman, it was infection. For the man, it was bread. This provides interesting insight into the world around us. The classifications that our voices reveal about ourselves determine the semantic associations in our listeners’ minds. The thoughts others have about us are already determined, to some degree, by the generalizations they can make based on our phonetic variation.

            Finally, the Sumner and Kataoka article continues with the theme of variance. The article focuses on the idiosyncratic relationship between accents and understanding. It posits that listeners can understand an accented word equally well even when primed with standard English. The idea of recognition equivalence stems from the hypothesis that a dense number of weak associations in the brain as compared to a sparse number of strongly coded episodes actually creates equality in understanding. Yet the false memory paradigm connects directly to the gender-based listening of Sumner and King’s article. People only listen for the gist of what people are saying if the accent is from New York rather than Great Britain when they can understand New Yorkers perfectly well. Thus, once again, phonetic variation affects how we perceive speakers before we even listen to what they are saying.