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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

Perceiving voice and speaker - how we experience each other when communicating and what it does to us

Alternative title: Stemmen til den som snakker - hvordan vi oppfatter hverandre når vi kommuniserer og hvordan det påvirker oss

Awarded: NOK 8.0 mill.

How do we experience each other in spoken linguistic communication and what does it do to our social interactions? When listening to a speaker, we come to understand what they say by perceiving the speech sounds they utter. But we also hear the speaker’s voice. Voice is an auditory face of the speaker. It conveys rich information not only about the speaker’s attitude and emotional state, but often also about their identity, age, gender, and even their socioeconomic status and regional background. The importance of such information in everyday social interactions in multilingual and multicultural societies is hard to overestimate. Yet in recent philosophical discussions of linguistic communication, the way the speaker sounds and the impression they make on a hearer have been largely ignored. The goal of this project is to provide the first, systematic, in depth philosophical investigation of the role of voice in linguistic communication and social interactions. This project will employ a multidisciplinary approach. It will show that an auditory experience of voice is a fundamental element of spoken linguistic communication. We will investigate how the experience of a voice can interact with our systematic expectations about speakers leading to various impressions of them. The project will explain how some of such impressions result in systematic cases of implicit bias and discrimination against specific groups of speakers and develop an ethical framework for addressing the latter. The project’s results will have practical consequences for policies against language-based discrimination.

How do we experience each other in spoken linguistic communication and what does it do to our social interactions? In spoken linguistic communication, any message is normally delivered by a particular speaker in a particular manner. When listening to a person speaking, we can come to understand what they say by perceiving the speech sounds they utter. But we also hear the speaker’s voice. Voice is an auditory face of the speaker. It conveys rich information not only about a speaker’s arousal and emotional state, but also about their identity, gender, age, and even their socioeconomic status and ethnic background. The importance of such information in everyday social interactions that take place in multilingual and multicultural societies is hard to overestimate. Yet in recent philosophical discussions on the nature and epistemic role of linguistic communication, the way the speaker sounds and the impression they make on a hearer have been largely ignored. The goal of this project is to provide the first, systematic, in-depth philosophical investigation of the role of voice in linguistic communication and social interactions. This project will show that an auditory experience of voice is a fundamental element of spoken linguistic communication. We will investigate how the experience of a voice can interact with our systematic expectations about speakers leading to various impressions of them. The project will explain how some of such impressions result in systematic cases of implicit bias and discrimination against specific groups of speakers and develop an ethical framework for addressing the latter. This project will employ a unique multidisciplinary approach. By explaining the impact of voice in linguistic communication, this project will establish a novel and important field of research in philosophy. The project’s results will have practical implications for policies against language-based discrimination, applicable also to the Norwegian context.

Funding scheme:

FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam