Anna Drożdżowicz
Affiliation: University of Inland Norway
Category: Philosophy
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 17:00
Location: Room 161 (161)
View the full session: Pragmatics
Title: Voice, speaker identity and communication
Abstract:
Voice is a powerful social cue. Extant empirical evidence from social psychology and sociolinguistics suggests that upon hearing a speaker’s voice, hearing interlocutors are not only able to track and recognize it as familiar (e.g., Belin et al. 2011) but will also form spontaneous voice-based impressions about various speaker characteristics (e.g., Schweinberger et al. 2014). For example, hearing a speaker’s voice, and/or their manner of speaking, may allow interlocutors to have an impression that the speaker is male or female (e.g., Owren et al. 2007), that they are of a certain age (e.g., Mulac & Giles 1996), that they are competent for a job (e.g., Rakic et al. 2011), that they have parenting skills (Fasoli & Maass 2020), or that they have a certain personality trait (e.g., McAleer et al. 2014). Following some of the recent empirical research in this area (e.g., Schweinberger et al. 2014: 15; see also Baus et al. 2019; Fasoli & Maass 2020), I will use here the term voice-based impressions to cover a wide range of impressions concerning speaker characteristics based on the perception of their voice. For simplicity, under this label I will also include selected speech-based impressions, i.e., impressions based on one’s manner of speaking and pronunciation, such as accent-based impressions. So described, voice-based impressions have been shown to influence various language-mediated social interactions (e.g., Lev-Ari & Keysar 2010; Klofstad et al. 2012; Rakic et al. 2011).
Despite the arguably high social and informative significance of voice-based impressions, pragmatic theories of communication have not paid much attention to this phenomenon. This talk fills this gap by investigating the role of voice-based impressions in spoken linguistic communication, in particular. I will adopt a relevance-theoretic and broadly post-Gricean view on which human communication is a rational activity in which speakers produce utterances with informative and communicative intentions and where the production and interpretation of such utterances relies on capacities for inference and metarepresentation (see e.g., Sperber 1995; Sperber & Wilson 1996; Wilson & Sperber 2012). Adopting this perspective will be conducive for developing the positive argument of the talk that will draw on recent work on utterance interpretation and epistemic vigilance.
I will argue that voice-based impressions can enter and impact linguistic communication in two different ways: (I) by serving as an input into epistemic vigilance mechanisms, in particular those responsible for vigilance towards the source (for discussion of vigilance see Sperber et al. 2010; Mazarella 2016); (II) and by providing non-ostensive stimulus for the mechanisms responsible for utterance interpretation (or comprehension, for recent discussion of such mechanisms see e.g. Allott 2022). Thus, I will propose a dual route model that explains how voice-based impressions can impact communication.
The dual route model presented in this talk is compatible with the fact that some of the effects of voice-based impressions on social interactions can, arguably, be seen as strictly post-pragmatic, i.e. as taking place at the stage that is clearly and uncontroversially after an utterance is interpreted (or comprehended) and that does not strictly concern trusting the information provided by the speaker. For example, competence evaluation of a candidate for trainee barrister, or a decision which of the two candidates is better to vote for are best seen as activities that happen after or on top of a linguistic interaction. In such cases, there should be no expectation that pragmatics, understood as a discipline that aims at explaining communication, would be invested in explaining such cases.
Supposing the dual route model is correct, a number of interesting questions arise, including, why certain voice-based impressions might feed into either epistemic vigilance mechanisms or comprehension mechanisms (or vice versa). If time permits, I will discuss some tentative suggestions for working with such questions. While the focus of the talk is on voice-based impressions concerning speaker identity, in particular, the suggested framework can hopefully be extended to impressions coming from other sensory modalities.
Selected references:
Allott, N. (2023). Encapsulation, inference and utterance interpretation. Inquiry, 1-35.
Belin, P., Bestelmeyer, P. E., Latinus, M., & Watson, R. (2011). Understanding voice perception. British Journal of Psychology, 102(4), 711-725.
Klofstad, C. A., Anderson, R. C., & Peters, S. (2012). Sounds like a winner: Voice pitch influences perception of leadership capacity in both men and women. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1738), 2698-2704.
Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of experimental social psychology, 46(6), 1093-1096.
Mazzarella, D. (2016). Pragmatics, modularity and epistemic vigilance. Argumenta, 1(2), 181-193.
Rakić, T., Steffens, M. C., & Mummendey, A. (2011). Blinded by the accent! The minor role of looks in ethnic categorization. Journal of personality and social psychology, 100(1), 16.
Schweinberger, S. R., Kawahara, H., Simpson, A. P., Skuk, V. G., & Zäske, R. (2014). Speaker perception. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 5(1), 15-25.
Sperber, D., Clément, F., Heintz, C., Mascaro, O., Mercier, H., Origgi, G., & Wilson, D. (2010). Epistemic vigilance. Mind & language, 25(4), 359-393.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2012). Meaning and relevance. CUP.