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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"