I’m currently taking ENG240, the language of gender and sexuality, and a very interesting study came up in our last session involving language, perception, and gender. In a study by Donald Rubin in 1992 recorded two college lectures, one in the humanities and one in the sciences. He played only the audio from a native English speaker, and in different rooms displayed two images: one of a white woman and one of an Asian woman. This was done to test students’ comprehension and ability to understand and detect accents with the same audio, but with differing images being displayed. Not only did the perceived accent score be significantly higher for the Asian photograph, but more students comprehended the lecture with the white woman’s photograph as well. This study ties race into gender and made me think heavily of the ways language effect gender, sex, and sexuality from this week’s reading.
Gender and Language
Square
I think this study is a great example of our perception bias as humans. Most of this bias comes from the words we learn, the words we say, and the words we hear. It is almost all language based which means all of it is more social than anything. This yet again reinforces the idea to be aware of your social surroundings, because being unaware is the equivalent of being ignorant.