Verbal Social Cues and Memory

Through this week’s articles, I learned much about how speech can tell us about a talker’s identity (e.g. age, gender) and how this ultimately affects the ways in which we interpret what the speaker says. Sumner (2015) gave us a concise overview of the social weight of speech through voice cues that activate social biases. The aspects of identity we attribute to someone simply based on how we perceive their speech can lead to discriminatory behavior, Sumner (2015) warns. Sumner & Kataka (2013) speak to how accent can determine how well we remember a word’s meaning and if we’ve previously seen the word or not. They found that General American (GA) speakers are likely to remember the meaning and whether they’ve previously seen a word or not if the word was spoken by a GA or Southern Standard British English (BE) speaker. However, when the word is spoken by someone with a New York City (NYC) accent, the meaning was often forgotten and there were high false recall rates. The third and final article by King & Sumner (2015) found that in meaning-based tasks (free association and semantic priming tasks), words are interpreted by the listener in “speaker-specific ways.”

The aspect of the studies that really stuck out to me was in the Sumner & Kataka (2013) article. The article proved that GA speakers were just as likely to retain the semantic meaning and low false recall rates when spoken by BA speakers as they were by GA speakers. The authors note that figuring out why our understanding of BA and GA speakers with regard to high semantic retainment and low false memories is important, but beyond the scope of their paper. I would like to posit a hypothesis to explain this phenomenon. The article mentions that semantic retainment and low false recall rates are because of the amount of attention we pay to the speaker. I hypothesize that we pay attention to the GA speaker because they are using the dialect that we are most familiar with – they are one of us. And be it the work of Hollywood or of simply the history of our nation’s conception, we pay much attention to the BA speaker because their accent represents prestige and sophistication in America, both politically and socio-culturally. Thus, because of these reasons, our attention is heightened when we listen to GA and BA speakers, therefore accounting for the high semantic retainment and the low false memories of GA listeners.