This week, we were introduced to one of the major components in linguistics. Little did we know, however, how relevant it is in our daily lives and how much it makes up our understanding in speech. This week we learned about variation, a concept that in linguistics relates to the way one word can have different meaning based on the speaker’s accent, as we learned from Sumner’s and Kataoke’s reading, gender, as we learned from King’s and Sumner’s reading, and perceived phonetics, as we learned from Sumner’s reading. Before the readings, however, we were introduced to the topic by hearing an audio file and making as much interpretations as we could from it. Truth is that I found myself to be very uncomfortable by the assignment because it took me no more than 3 seconds to interpret the speaker to be an African American woman. When asked what about her speech made me made that association, it was hard for me to come with a logical, reasonable fact that made me think that. I wished I could just say, “Trust me, she is.”
As I read Sumner’s paper and learned about how social representations, biases, and overall listener’s processing are learned in the early years, and continue to automatically “map” our understanding of a speaker early in the conversation, I felt more of a normal human being and my thoughts about being far more judgmental than I thought I was furthered diminished. As great as I thought my lack of fault was, however, it then made me think how sad is it that I found comfort on the fact that everybody seems to do it, and worst, the fact that we all make this automatic preconceived notions based on the speaker’s gender, accent, emotion, and age. Reading from King’s and Sumner’s paper, where they talked about how voice phonetics affect semantic interpretation, I further realized how much I see of this is my daily life. Having attended a Catholic school, for example, it is amazing how many times I heard the word God. “Oh myyyyy God”, my friends would say. “Let us be thankful to God.” the priest would claim. “The Mexican God...”, my history professor would ask. I wouldn’t have to see their faces to predict who said it and with what meaning I would relate the word God to mean, in the case I would have to match them to a speaker. I found very interesting his example of the semantic distinction the word “princess” has based on the American child vs. a british adult. I would honestly make the same association, and would be interested in learning what other words are associated to different semantic meanings. In addition to Sumner’s and King’s and Sumner’s points on how variation affect our understanding when listening, Sumner’s and Kataoke’s paper provides us another way in which variation affects our understanding, but this time I believe the point to be more subjective to each people’s personality and effort. After an experiment in which listeners were to interpret and declare how much they understood from each, a General American, a New Yorker, and a British English speaker, they concluded that people tend to declare their understanding to be higher when is considered more sophisticated, and hence understood better the General American and the British English speaker than the New Yorker. I wonder what someone from the Upper East side would say about this… Returning to the topic, though, I found this to be true in the context that having been exposed to many non native speakers and also having concluded this on class, it is fair to conclude that people claim to understand less and (and trust less) people with heavy accents which are not considered polish. However, I would claim that such level of understanding also comes from how much people actually try to understand. It may be harder to keep entertained by a New Yorker accent than from a British one, but I would claim that such amusement could also result in a distraction that blocks true understanding. So, although I agree that accents make a huge part of someone’s ability to communicate, I claim that it is also be subjective depending on the listener.
Nevertheless, I think variation to be a key component of communication and I am glad that we are capable to learn that much context of a person when our perception fits that person because that helps us understand our audience way better when we are directing ourselves to others, as I guessed is the case with politicians. However, because our assumptions are not a one-size-fits-all, it gets really messy and unfortunate that we can make so many wrong judgements on a person without knowing them. 
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