This is your brain on language

What really struck me about this week’s readings was how much of language processing happens on a subconscious level. Not only are we capable of decoding a series of sounds or symbols and converting them into an infinite number of meanings and reversing that process, but we are not even aware of most of the steps required for this to happen. Even though the King and Sumner study did not find the expected difference in response time depending on the speaker, there is still a great deal of processing that our brains so when we hear even a very short utterance. Based on a word, we can classify a speaker’s gender, age, region, native language, and many other demographics, all without even trying. The same goes for the many factors involved in producing speech. Without being aware of what the phonetic changes are that we make to pronunciation, we can affect and recognize accents to which we may have relatively little exposure. We can also use awareness of these intricacies and the way that people ascribe significance to speech production to our advantage, as seen in the Podesva analysis. Condaleezza Rice can alter people’s perception of her by adopting a way of speaking that allows her to fit into a field that is white, male, upper class dominated. Although this would ideally not be necessary some day of greater equality in the future, hearing an African American woman from the South speak carries the weight of the listener’s opinions of those broader categories, completely separately from how Rice herself might be. Our language processing and production abilities are so much greater than what is needed for pure communication; human speech is inherently social, and the manner of utterance is just as important as the content.