Sociolinguistics

This week the three articles I read were centered around sociolinguistics, how our social biases can impact what we hear, and how we discriminate based off speech. These readings tie in very closely to what we have been discussing in class over the past week. The first article I read was by King and Sumner entitled "Voice-specific effects in semantic association". In this article the goal was to determine whether speaker specific attributes or cues could affect the interpretation of the words they spoke. King and Sumner used two different experiments, first to establish the listener's association strengths the listener was supposed to respond to spoken words in speaker-specific ways, and there was a surprising amount of variation. Second, the listeners were supposed to respond to one of four speakers, and often times they did so based off the specific association strengths that were learned from the first experiment. These two experiments combined found strong effects of speaker-specific word associations in both free association and semantic priming tasks.

The second article I read was by Podesva, and this article was about analyzing the speech of Condoleeza Rice.  Through meticulous data gathering and dissecting, it became evident that the way she speaks dictates a profession and social status that is different from where she grew up. She does not display the traditional regional characteristics in her speech from areas of her upbringing, but rather she speaks in a way that tells a story of what she has accomplished. Her speech has characteristics of a high level of education, her political views, and Standard African American english. I found this last note that the article made to be particularly interesting because I was not aware that there was such a thing as Standard African American english. I can very much see the African American Vernacular English in my life, however the differences in Standard African American english must be much more minute then in the AAVE because I did not know that it existed however I am very curious to learn more about these subtle yet distinct versions of english.

The last article I read was by Sumner and in it she discusses how we as listeners map acoustic "bundles" to social representations through visual and auditory cues subconsciously. Throughout our lifetime we have accumulated tons of experience that leads us to making generalizations and often times this generalizations affect how we listen to speech. This topic was particularly interesting because I wrote about how we make this generalizations based off our own experiences in the HW last week, and one of the big things I was unaware of was how it affected how we even listen to certain people. I was bummed to find out how early on in our interpretation of speech that these biases come into play, however I would love to see more research on possibly solutions to mitigate the effects of such biases.