What You Say vs. How You Say It

This week’s articles focused on the effect of priming on how listeners perceived a given auditory stimulus. For instance, the first study done by Sumner for titled “The Social Weight of Spoken Words”, Sumner studied social weighting which is the idea that speech cues affect retention of auditory input. I found it particularly interesting how early in the listening process that listeners’ formed a bias. It shows that we naturally pay more attention to a voice that we deem more important without even realizing it. On one hand, this is could be beneficial because it allows the brain to use heuristics to quickly process auditory stimuli, but at the same time these heuristics inevitably lead to bias and discrimination. The second article I read titled “Voice-Specific Effects in Semantic Association” attempted to discern if different voices from different genders and ages caused listeners to associate different words. This makes sense intuitively because if a manly voice were to say “clothes” one might associate a t shirt and jeans, but if a woman’s voice were to say “clothes” one might associate a dress or blouse. In the end they did find that there was a significant difference in on-line and off-line word association depending on the voice characteristics of the speaker. Finally, the third article I read titled “Effects of Phonetically-Cued Talker Variation on Semantic Encoding” is another example of exploring the effects of voice characteristics on listeners’ perception. This article showed that General American Speakers have an easier time remembering a word’s meaning and if he or she has seen the word if the word is spoken in GA or British English. If a different accent, for instance New York were used, then there were more false recall rates and meanings of words were forgotten.

Together, these articles make me wonder how much of our communication is based on what we say vs how we say it. The TICS article shows us that listeners are already tuning out voices that have a less social weight regardless of content. Additionally, the King/Sumner article shows that the content is also interpreted differently based on voice characteristics. It seems that how you say something is almost more important than what you say. I wonder though how this effect differs over different cultures. When I studied abroad in Europe, I noticed that most European people would treat me differently if I spoke Italian or Spanish but with an accent. It was immediately apparent that I was an outsider, and I could feel a tinge of judgment. However, when I worked in Singapore where the main language is English with a Chinese/British accent, speaking with an English accent was seen as almost cool. Maybe it would be worth studying not only the effects of different accents on listeners but listeners from different cultures on the same accent.