Memory and evaluation of accented speech and speakers
Winter 2018 Seminar
Instructor: Charlotte Vaughn
Course description
Are you interested in Linguistics with an eye toward social justice? Ever wondered how the way a person speaks may have an impact on how they are judged, understood, and remembered by those listening to them? This seminar will explore such issues.
In this seminar, we will consider the consequences of listening to different kinds of speakers (especially voices with different accents, including regional/ethnic/foreign accents) on memory and social evaluation of accented speech and accented speakers. The course will focus on speech perception, but will also pull from other areas in phonetics, as well as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience. In our investigations, we will keep in mind real-world applications of the studies we read, and students will design follow-up studies with specific real-world impacts in mind (e.g., criminal justice: Does accent affect how members of a jury remember the testimony of a witness? Does accent affect how an earwitness would recognize a potential suspect’s voice? Does accent affect a jury’s estimation of a witness’ credibility?).
Many previous studies have investigated how well listeners can recognize the words being said by different kinds of speakers (different individual speakers, speakers with different regional accents, different foreign accents, etc.). However, as a field we know very little about how such variation in spoken language affects other aspects of language processing, such as memory and social evaluation. Thus, we’ll investigate questions like:
- How does the presence of an unfamiliar (or familiar) accent affect how we remember information spoken by a speaker?
- How do accents affect our memory of the source of information? How does an accent affect our identification of voices?
- How do we encode accented voices in memory?
- Do we judge accented speakers differently in terms of social characteristics?
- What cognitive mechanisms are involved in these processes?
Some of these questions have started to be answered, but some have barely begun to be asked. Students, then, have the exciting opportunity to use that previous work to ask new questions, and to brainstorm possible follow-up studies targeting some of the important unanswered questions in these areas that have real world impact.
Prerequisites
Previous coursework in Linguistics is required, preferably Phonetics (LING 411/511). Please email the instructor, Charlotte Vaughn (cvaughn @ uoregon.edu) with any questions about the class!