Social Bias and Language Processing

The readings this week focused on how people process spoken word – where bias comes into effect and how different guises and accents as well as gender influence the processing of spoken language.

The TICS article discussed the influence of bias on language processing, and when this discrimination occurs. It uses examples of how gender and prosody affect how quickly speech is processed. It also shows that talker processing can occur before lexicon processing occurs, meaning that social weighting of speech is a huge factor in how language is processed. The TICS article references the other articles, and uses examples from those studies to explain how and when social weighting occurs.

The Talker variation effects on semantic encoding paper examined the effects different accents had both on the recognition of words and on veridical and false recall. It found that the accent of the talked did influence the semantic encoding of information given through speech, as well as lexical access to words spoken by accented speakers.

The Voice-specific effects in semantic association paper examined the semantic differences associated with words because of the gender of the speaker. The experiments found that words spoken by a female voice did induce different word association than the male speaker.

All experiments warn that studies of this scale, with multiple variations between talkers do not mean that the results are solely based on what each paper hopes to prove. However, each shows that in some way, how a speaker talks influences how any person processes the speech. This bias has significant impact on the spoken word recognition process, and as a result is something that must be considered when studying language.