This week’s three readings emphasize the inextricable dependencies language has on our social environment.
Dr. Sumner’s article, “The Social Weight of Spoken Words” set the tone for this sociolinguistic examination by suggesting from evidence that “talker information” and social representations are activated very early on, even before accessing the lexicon, in the process of understanding spoken language. This has tremendous implications for the way we perceive our social biases. These social representations influence our allotted amount of attention for the individual speaker, meaning that our cognitive processing resources are not evenly distributed among speakers of different backgrounds; thus, any comparison of actual semantic value of two speakers of different accents is already biased by the insufficient memory recall of a traditionally marginalized speaker versus the more accurate verbatim recollection of someone with a more preferred General American or British English accent. This brings to light an interesting question of just how much control we have over our own biases, even as we become more aware of them --- even speakers of a stigmatized dialect exhibit the same behavior against their own speaker background.
The King and Sumner paper expands on this topic with studies pairing a young white female speaker and an older African American male speaker. The evidence points to a greater lexical activation, semantic priming, and thus overall increased understanding for the former speaker and illustrates the asymmetries in spoken language understanding due to voice characteristics. The paper, and the Kataoka and Sumner paper, both suggest the need for an updated linguistic model for spoken word recognition based beyond simply the frequency of encounters; a “social weighting” formula must also apply in establishing these associations. This would then explain the heavy amount of memory recall we place on brief encounters with information departed upon us college students by our professors, to whom we attribute a large social weight due to their title and position, in contrast to repeated exposure to information we might deem trivial and thus are given a smaller social weight.
This shows just how complex and nuanced navigating the social and linguistic landscape truly is --- as what we, as well-intentioned human beings, hold ideal and believe ourselves to be doing, varies drastically from the realities caused by the intricate workings of human cognition.
I too found it very interesting that even speakers of stigmatized dialects are biased against their own dialect and show a certain behavior against people of their own speaker background. This discovery has huge implications, because it means that these biases are extremely deeply rooted in social interactions, and will be very hard to get rid of. This problem has many aspects and will be something that society has to work on.
ReplyDeleteHello Po! I also found it troubling and interesting that our internal ideals affect the way we even attend to language. Ian, you touched on this in your response as well, but I found it incredibly interesting that British English speakers primed General American listeners just as well as General American speakers did. It seemed to me a clear example of the way our biases and internal held beliefs can subconsciously change the way we listen and understand.
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