Speech Variation

This week's readings were particularly interesting to me because I was able to connect them to my own experiences.All of these readings analyzed the associations that humans make from other people's speech. The first reading expressed the power of variation in speech and body language. I find it fascinating that our past experiences, thoughts, and biases affect how we process and remember speech. We instantly identify cues in people's speech and use those cues to make assumptions about the speaker's social characteristics. I also enjoyed learning that we acknowledge and process words faster based on the context and the speaker. If a young child says something that is typically said by an adult, such as "I might be pregnant," then it takes the listener a longer time to recognize those words. 

While reading Voice-Specific Effects in Semantic Association and Effects of Phonetically-Cued Talker Variation on Semantic Encoding, I was amazed by the detail that Sumner and her co-workers put into selecting participants and stimuli for the experiments. So many factors go into the decision process, and a lot of energy is dedicated to decreasing the risk of bias.

These studies were thought-provoking and insightful, and they reveal a lot about human behavior. One factoid that interested me was that we choose "center" as the main way to say center and view "cenner" as the non-primary pronunciation. However, the majority of humans say "cenner" and do not pronounce the "t." Another result that stood out to me was that prompts from speaker J (older African-American man) elicited a greater variety of responses than prompts from speaker M (younger white woman). Finally, I love accents, and I found it fascinating that people treat speakers with British accents with a higher regard.

These studies will impact my future conversations and cause me to analyze other people's reactions to different styles of speech. A large part of racism and discrimination stems from how we react to people's language, and I want to understand how we can stop ourselves from making assumptions about people based on their speech.