Voice and word interpretation

Professor Sumner’s paper, “The Social Weight of Spoken Words”, focuses largely on the variability of speech and its effects on our perception of the speaker. It was found that social information conveyed by a voice actually triggers social representations much faster than we might think, even before we access our lexicon. Yet language’s ability to influence our social representations so quickly can lead to social weighting. The paper then explains the influence that spoken language can have on one’s memory, by analyzing General Stanford English, British English and New York City English.  The interesting conclusion is that words spoken in less significant languages such as the New York English, were less likely to be remembered than those in prestigious languages such as British English. If I had to come up with a hypothesis as to why this is the case, I would likely relate it to how American’s think that British English is more ‘proper’ so we therefore set it to a higher standard. New York English on the other hand is, many times, viewed as rough and less luxurious.

The Sumner King paper focus also on the connection between voice cues and word interpretation/recognition. They explained the influence that gender, for example, could have on the processing of spoken words. When the sentence “I always check my make-up before I leave” was uttered by both a man and a woman, differences in responses were definitely noted. Summer and King hoped to explore this difference by running two experiments. The first one “addresses the question of whether listeners interpret a given word as having different semantic associations depending on the voice of the speakers”. And this proved to be true. Responses to words differed more greatly if the speaker were changed. The second experiment explored listener’s reactions of targets when primes are included, for example the reaction to the word “yeast” when followed by “infection” or “nurse” when followed by “doctor”. The results concluded that reactions to targets/prime pairs remained similar regardless of changes in the speaker, however that speaker specific association strength could improve reaction times. These two experiments further support that the voices of those we listen to definitely do influence our interpretations of the spoken words.

The Podesva paper proved to be the most interesting for me. He basically takes Rice’s speech and scrutinizes every aspect of it. Based on her pronunciations and word choices, Podesva concludes that she would be categorized as a “conservative, professional African American”, due to her association with political conservativeness, high level of education, and elements of SAAE. This continues to relate to the overall theme within this week’s readings that there is a deep connection between speaker voice and listener interpretation. In the paper on Rice for example, her high level education could be recognized by how she releases word-final voiceless obstruent’s, while at the same time, her production of vowels shows that she overcame social adversity in her past. The reason I enjoyed this paper was because it created a strong link between linguistics and the outside world. We don’t realize the influence that words have on our understanding of things until we get to read papers similar to the ones we read this week.