Speech Perception and Social Constructs

The articles this week focused on the impact spoken language has on our perception of the speaker as well as the content of their speech.  The Social Weight of Spoken Words concisely introduces the concept of “talker information” and explains how we draw social representations of speakers even before we consider what it is that they are saying.  I thought it was interesting that our social representation of a speaker affects how quickly we can interpret their speech and that we start forming social representations very early in our lives.

The King/Sumner article then dives into how listeners respond to talkers and interpret their speech.  The article discusses how talker information affects our semantic representation of what the talker is saying.  We draw conclusions about the speaker’s background based on information we deduce from their voices, and then use that to try to extrapolate meaning in their words beyond what they actually say.  For instance, if a female is talking, we can deduce that they are female from phonetic information we perceive in their voice, and that changes how we perceive the validity, intent and meaning of what we see compared to how we might perceive the exact same speech uttered from a male.

I thought that the Podesva article did a good job of illustrating a real world example of how people manipulate and change their tendencies in speech to achieve tasks.  Podesva explains that Condoleezza Rice, who has presumably spent a lot of time considering and manipulating her speech, speaks differently than how one would expect her too, given her background and upbringing.  Podesva’s article shows how powerful speech perception is, and how handy of a tool it can become for someone who is aware of it.

Finally, the Sumner/Kataoka article shows how our social representations of a speaker effect how efficiently and accurately we can understand what they are saying.  I thought this was interesting because I would have presumed that we would have evolved to be as efficient and accurate as possible when trying to understand what people say, but it turns out that other societal factors have caused a sort of inefficiency.  This shows that prejudices and stereotypes are not only harmful to those being discriminated against, but also to the discriminators.  It seems like a small instance of karmic justice, but it probably perpetuates the issue even deeper.