Sumner: It is not particularly surprising that people comport themselves towards others in a variety of ways depending on the social relation the two share. Someone interested in physics who is thinking of going to grad school to study quantum mechanics will likely pay much more attention (allocate more cognitive resources) to a physicist lecturer than someone who harbors no attraction towards natural science whatsoever. One of the ways that social relation is determined is through speech, i.e., talker variation. In this short paper, Sumner argues that voice cues activate social recognition very early and quickly. One consequence of this proposition is that not all spoken language encounters are created equal. Rather, encounters in specialized social contexts (like a mother slowly pronouncing “center” with a hard ’t’ sound to help her child pronounce it) are weighted more heavily than run of the mill encounters (like someone casually pronouncing “center” without the hard ’t’ sound).
Sumner + Kataoka: The experiment in this paper demonstrates the ‘social weighting’ mentioned in the previous paper. Participants were asked to recognize and recall words spoken by people with a variety of accents (General English, British English and New York City accent). It was found that people had higher rates of false recall when it came to the NYC accent than to BE; this is perhaps because BE is ‘socially weighted’ more heavily than NYC accents, meaning that we prioritize semantically encoding what we hear when said with a British accent over a NYC accent.
Sumner + King: The goal of this paper was to investigate the extent to which words are interpreted in speaker specific ways. To this end, two speakers, one an African American man in his 80s and the other a White American woman in her 30s read a long list of words. Participants listened to the words and then typed the first word that came to mind. For many, in fact the majority, of the words the participants agreed on the word that came to mind; however, there was significant divergence (e.g., the word “yeast” was associated with “bread” when said by the man, but associated with “infection” when spoken by the woman), lending credence to the theory that this paper set out to prove, namely that words are interpreted differently based on characteristics of the speaker.
I am interested in why and how people socially weigh certain encounters more than others - for instance, why is it that NYC accents are not socially weighted as heavily as British accents? Is it something to do with the way it sounds, considered in itself, or purely a product of cultural attitudes (e.g., to see British people as more ‘sophisticated’ and NYC speakers as unsophisticated) - if the latter, how exactly are these cultural attitudes absorbed? After all, it is not as though most people are explicitly told “British speakers are more respectable than NYC speakers”, etc…
Hi Galen,
ReplyDeleteI am also interested in how we weight social interactions. I definitely agree with you when you say that not all spoken language encounters are created equal. I think this particular linguistic fact that Sumner discusses carries the greatest social implications. When considered in the context of marginalized groups and stigmatized subpopulations, the efforts we make to bring these groups greater equality is actually undermined by our language system. As much as we try to rectify institutional problems and make laws to create change, much of our biases still remain, embedded in the ways our brains perceive language.
The first form of discrimination occurs from the moment we begin listening to another person. We subconsciously began to formulate images and generalizations about the person based on their phonetic variations. In the case of different accents, these initial impressions even dictate how well we remember what is said. I am interested in how we can overcome these encoded responses to speakers. Is there a way we can transcend the inherent discrimination embedded in our own responses to linguistic variation?