[From Bill Powers (930303.0830)]
Bruce Nevin (930302.1430) --
... I can imagine seeing your glasses in your hand from your
point of view, but unless I have considerable experience with
recording equipment I cannot imagine the acoustic image of my
voice as others hear it.The reference perceptions must be for
the subjective (intracranial) acoustic image, not for the voice
that others hear.
That doesn't matter. EACH person speaks in such a way that the
production is perceived as similar to (or deliberately different
from) what is heard when others speak. The similarity is
perceived only above a certain level (obviously it doesn't feel
the same kinesthetically), and it's only at that level and above
that there can be imitation. There can be great variation at the
lower levels -- as you showed some time ago in remarking that the
kinesthetic aspects of phoneme production vary widely from one
person to another without altering the phoneme that is heard.
The reproduction of heard speech is more analogous to putting the
fork "in" the water glass than to imitating the way the
spectacles are held. The aspects of speech that are reproduced
are those that are independent of point of view, while
reproducing the orientation of the glasses specifically requires
a transformation of the point of view.
So the reference perceptions must be adjusted and established
with respect to factors in others' responses to us.
They must be adjusted and established with respect to WHAT WE
PERCEIVE OF factors in others' responses to us. There's no way
for any individual to know what those factors "actually are."
Do they recognize us as the kind of person we intend to present
ourselves as?
Finding out how others recognize us is a matter of how we
interpret our perceptions of their behavior. I have not noticed
that people are particularly good at grasping the kind of person
I perceive them as, nor am I very good at doing vice versa. Since
effects on other people's perceptions are not actually
observable, one can only guess what they are by comparing others'
behavior with one's own: "If I acted that way, I would be
perceiving the other person in a certain way." There is no way to
verify this guess; one can only look for consistency in the
evidence under one's model of the other person.
Do they accord to us social roles and expectations that are
acceptable or (better, of course) that we desire?
Nobody can "accord us a social role." Another person can behave
as if we are playing a certain social role; that is quite
independent of the social role we see ourselves playing. If these
independent perceptions don't lead to actions and consequences
compatible with both perceptions of social role, there will be
conflict. If they do avoid conflict, there is still no reason to
think that the two perceptions are the same. They are simply not
in conflict.
Do we get a balance of our desire for independence vs. our
desire for acceptance and intimacy that is acceptable to us?
Oops! Do we even know how to talk about independence vs.
intimacy in PCT terms?
To "desire independence" is to misinterpret human nature
according to PCT. The basic problem of human existence is that we
ARE independent, whether we like it or not. Each person is free
every waking movement of the day to set any goal whatsoever,
including the goal of stepping off a cliff or stepping into
traffic. All that prevents selecting such goals is a potential
conflict with other goals -- nothing external has the slightest
say in the matter.
Our actions have consequences outside us; we can't determine what
those consequences are to be. But we can select any goals we
please for those consequences: that they should occur, that they
should have certain forms, that they should not occur.
Independence is not a problem, but intimacy is. All of us, I
think, want to find evidence of a person like ourselves -- at
least of the same basic nature -- behind the exterior appearances
that others present to us. We do not want to be the only sentient
being; we don't want to be alone. So we make great efforts to
contact the person behind the facade, and we set goals that
include doing what is necessary to achieve that contact -- if we
can figure out what is necessary.
This is where a seeming problem with independence arises, because
the other person has goals too, and conflict with them lessens
the contact with the other person. We often find that in order to
entice the other into revealing what we want to experience, we
come into conflict with other goals of our own; to achieve this
intimacy we must do things we don't want to do. But this is still
an internal conflict, because nothing prevents us from giving up
any goal, including the goal of knowing the other, or the goal of
not doing certain things. The basic problem is achieving internal
consistency among our goals.
That [is] what I intended to communicate -- that the illusion
of the glottal stop would appear only in speakers who had to
prevent themselves from extending the vowel into a diphthong
in order to imagine matching the heard vowel.
Now why would a speaker of one language *have* to end a
word-final stressed syllable with a diphthong or a consonant?
Clearly, there is no physiological or neurological constraint,
which would have to apply to speakers of all languages.
Of course not. I said they "had to"
prevent themselves from extending the vowel into a diphthong
in order to imagine matching the heard vowel.
The "in order do" supplies the reason they have to prevent
themselves. The goal is to match the heard vowel. But the vowel
they are used to hearing is extended into a dipthong, so as
speakers of a given language that is their normal reference
perception for the vowel. When they imagine saying "no" they
imagine "no-ooo", but to say "no" in the Spanish way they must
prevent the "ooo" from appearing, which creates an error in the
normal control system that they have learned. At a higher level
they experience this as cutting the vowel short, as in a glottal
stop. People whose reference signal is the Spanish "no" would
have no experience of the illusion. (My own illusion is that the
"o" is nasalized -- sort of the opposite of a glottal stop).
Rather, there is a socially instituted pattern on the basis of
which speaker/hearer's expectations get set.
This is not an explanation, but a description. There is a social
pattern, which means only that most of the people with whom the
test person interacts speak in a similar manner. The existence of
this pattern can't, by itself, have any effect on anyone. If a
person's speech changes when the person interacts extensively
with this group, that is only because selecting the group's way
of speaking suits the person's purposes. There are plenty of
cases to show that there is nothing necessary about the social
influence on pronunciation -- just consider all the British
receptionists who were hired for the neat accent, and make sure
they don't lose it because their job depends on it. Or the movie
and TV actors. Or the taxi drivers from Brooklyn. Or certain ex-
Europeans who consider American phonemes ugly and refuse to adopt
them. You can't base a serious law of speech acquisition on a
generalization with so many exceptions.
Expectations are set, according to HPCT, by higher-level systems,
not by perceptions. All that perceptions can do is provide raw
material in memory, from which higher systems select the
instances that fit their goals. Most people can imitate accents
other than the ones they normally use, at least well enough to be
speaking in an obviously different way. It is not the set of
recorded perceptions of speech that determine the accent we
choose, but our goals for our relationships to those around us.
Some people think (almost always mistakenly) that the way to
entertain people around them is to tell jokes in dialect. They
may not achieve an entertained state in those who hear the joke,
but that is certainly the goal, and the correct explanation for
the way the joke-teller is pronouncing words at the moment. I
have observed that people who tell such jokes also perceive that
the others are entertained, which explains why they persist. They
perceive themselves in a social role that matches what they want
it to be; the others perceive something else, but their self-
images prevent them from being frank.
We feel a need to be consistent with one another, and out of
this does develop impressive consistency in social conventions
or norms associated with subpopulations to which people
identify themselves as belonging.
That I can agree with. Particularly if you add that most people
would identify themselves as belonging to a number of different
subpopulations (e.g., a sports-loving homosexual stockbroker
living with her Vietnamese husband in Bedford-Stuyvesant).
But we don't have to identify subpopulations "objectively."
People--the members of the social groups--do it for us. Or
rather they do it for themselves, and for each other.
Do you mean that they walk up to you and tell you what
subpopulation they belong to, so you don't have to do any
interpreting of your own?
And
social dialect is an excellent index when you consider natives
of a place like NYC, for example. (Don't take my word for it,
have a look at Labov's methods and results in the papers in
_Language in the Inner City_ f'rinstance.)
You can't run that logic both ways at once. If dialect is used to
identify the subpopulation, then you can't prove that there is
any shared characteristic other than the dialect, in which case
all you've shown is that some people speak with that dialect and
some don't. Either you pick the dialect as the discriminator, or
some other set of characteristics like living in the inner city.
To prove an association you'd have to show that not using the
dialect means you don't live in the inner city, or that living in
the inner city means that you have to speak with that dialect,
and the two converse cases. If ALL the cases don't prove out
every time, then all you've got is one of those statistical
generalizations that's true of a population but not of any
particular person. You certainly don't get any explanation for
why one person speaks in a particular dialect on a particular
occasion, and another doesn't.
Sure, there are people that don't fit in, including obviously
tourists and immigrants from other regions, but also effortful
misfits of one sort or another.
So everyone is the same except for those who are different. This
is, if you will excuse me, the usual kind of excuse that is made
for statistical generalizations. The longer you examine the
actual individuals involved, the more excuses are needed. This is
why I have no use for "facts" about individual behavior that are
based on statistics. They're facts, except when they're not.
This is simply true: there are people that don't fit in the
major social strata and groupings of any given community.
Sometimes their seeming idiosyncrasies turn out to be negations
or reversals of the norms of one or more existing groups, by
which they deny membership. Sometimes they take on
characteristics associated with one or more truly "foreign"
groups (the guy from Topeka who talks with a put-on British
accent; Bobby Zinnaman's knock-up of Ramblin' Jack Elliott in
his emerging persona as Bob Dylan). And some people may truly
bridge or alternate membership in more than one local group.
More of the same. Excuses, excuses. Let's face it: this way of
understanding people just doesn't work. So-called social strata
and groupings and norms exist mostly in the imagination of the
statistician. They are perceptual prejudices. If you pick any
individual at random and try to apply your generalization, you
will find that you need a dozen excuses to explain why this
person doesn't fit the category or behave like others whom you
put in the same category. When you finish with the excuses (none
of which is in fact investigated to see if it actually fits), all
you have done is to discard from your sample all the individuals
who don't fit the generalization. If you go through the
population person by person in this way, you may end up with
nobody left.
Just because social psychology and sociology have often been
inept handmaidens of government (and employers), trying to keep
their hands aseptic and "objective", does not discredit social
groupings as something that people identify and identify with
or against.
I have not said that ONLY statisticians commit this sort of
foolishness. People who informally identify with social groupings
don't know any more about what is actually a social grouping than
statisticians do -- if anything, their concepts are even looser
and less consistent, and would lead to confusion even sooner
under any kind of detailed questioning. Everyone imagines living
in a certain kind of society, which doesn't actually exist and
isn't like the society that the next person believes in. When any
individual says "us" you haven't the least idea what he means,
and neither, come to think of it, does he.
Society, in my view, is a continuum in which individuals vary
along a hundred dimensions in ways independent of each other. Yet
the members of the society like to look at superficial secondary
characteristics like where one lives, how one dresses, how one
speaks, what one does for a living, what one says aloud about
beliefs, and so forth, and forms perceptions of groupings that
have almost nothing to do with what makes each person that person
and no other. Worst of all, the individuals then begin to deal
with others whom they see as sharing these apparent patterns of
secondary characteristics as if they were all right in the
middle, and all alike. The use of formal statistics to define
such groupings simply makes the prejudice harder to recognize for
what it is.
Has anyone here read Deborah Tannen's work on manners of
speaking? _You Just Don't Understand_ is the most popular one,
on stereotypically male-female differences in conversational
style and problems that follow from them.
It's really a book about what's wrong with stereotyping -- that
is, with speaking in terms of averages of populations -- isn't
it?
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Best,
Bill P.