In this week’s reading we looked at the effects of speech characteristics on how we process and make meaning from words as how we both project and infer social identity from speech. Through the analysis of one of Condoleezza Rice’s speeches the Podesva paper looks at what aspects of her various identities (politician, academic, black woman, southerner, westerner, conservative, etc) are represented in her speech characteristics.
The Sumner paper on social weight discusses just how important these speech characteristics are in influencing our perceptions of people. In it she tells us how listeners make conclusions about one’s social identity as they are listening. Biases against people are processed as we process speech and as such may affect our encoding of what they say, how we attune to it as it is happening, and what we take from it. This includes how well we remember what they said. This process of inferring social identity through speech variations is a parallel to biases triggered by our visual perception of someone’s skin color or other variations in appearance. This process as a whole is referred to as social weighting. On a related topic I’d love to know in what ways if any linguists are contributing to literature on deconstructing biases and implementing biases training for people in positions of power such as police officers.
The King and Sumner paper along with the Sumner and Kataoke paper discuss how words are interpreted/processed in ways that depend on the characteristics of the speaker. In Voice-specific effects in semantic association King and sumner illustrate how a single spoken cue will bring a different word to mind in the same listener depending on the characteristics of the speaker voice. And furthermore that that speed of word recognition following a prompt improves with the voice specific association strength between the two words. I didn’t have a great understanding of the paper co-authored by Kataoka but it seemed to indicate that variations in our encoding and recall of words pronounced with different accents can’t be accounted for by frequency of exposure alone.
I definitely can relate to your point about the King Sumner paper. I agree that the model of speech-word perception highly correlates with the social information and cues that have become synonymous with spoken language. I wonder what kind of implications the paper has for how language affects our choices tangibly. For example, in the example of a female at a physics conference, which is heavily male influenced, I wonder if that and other similar situations can influence people's decisions first, or do people's decisions influence the event? And I also wonder how it ties back to linguistics - perhaps certain social and linguistic cues prime us to think or believe certain things about people. I'd imagine it's very much a chicken and the egg scenario where we have circular logic influencing what we believe and how we act. Regardless, the king sumner paper really was cool.
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