Voice and word associations

In the King-Sumner paper, we learn about how research was done to study how particular voices affect semantics in assigning meaning to what is being said. The researchers attempted to determine whether there was agreement in what people responded with to primers across different voices, and whether these reaction times vary across voices. Although the reaction times showed no significant differences from voice to voice, agreement between test subjects varied depending on what voice was heard. For a young, white female, test subjects agreed more in their response to her priming words than for an older, African-American male. A remark that really stuck with me from this reading was in the initial justification for this experiment, in which it is mentioned that “listeners exhibit an N400 – a negative ERP spike related to difficulty incorporating semantic information – when a spoken message was inconsistent with perceived speaker identity; this effect was similar to, but smaller than, the N400 seen when processing semantic anomalies”. Is it possible that this perceived inconsistency between information and speaker identity and the resulting incomprehension is at the root of intolerant attitudes towards others who are from different groups, such as homophobia and racism?

In Podesva, we learn about the creation of an identity through linguistics by studying the speech traits of Condoleezza Rice. Being someone who lived in multiple regions of the United States, each with their own variations of speech, Rice’s speech interestingly developed into a voice that favors neutrality and ideological standardization. It was really nice to see the integration of many of the topics we have dealt with this quarter, including an analysis of her glottalization using Praat. I wonder how many N400’s she’s triggered.

In professor Sumner’s TICS, among other things, she speaks about semantic asymmetries between different dialects of English, which includes effects on memory. According to one study, “when recalling spoken words produced by talkers with accents different from the listening population, listeners remember the gist of what was said for a talker with a stigmatized accent (e.g., New York City) and exactly what was said for a talker with a prestigious accent (e.g., Southern Standard British English)”. Intuitively, this makes sense because it seems as though the speech of accented foreigners can be associated to non-verbal ways of communication. Consequently, it is easier to remember word-for-word what was said because we are actually acting out their speech rather than memorizing words and repeating them. However, I want to disagree that the basis of this difference is due to internalized prejudice against some dialects and veneration of others by proposing that this difference is more likely the result of being less familiar with stigmatized languages than those considered prestigious. In other words, a possible misunderstanding here is that prestigious dialects are correlated with better memory, but the actual cause of varying memory is difference in exposure to different dialects.