Speech can either cause some of our biggest social divides or it will bring us all together. One way to create diversity and unity in our speech is found in the value of learning multiple languages. Growing up in a home experiencing more than one language means that you are able to perceive people’s speech in different ways. Having grown up with Cantonese being my primary language, yet living in an English dominant world, I saw that first hand which is why it brings me great joy to share to bring on Katherine Kinzler to the podcast.

Katherine is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared regularly in the New York Times and other outlets, and she was named a “Young Scientist,” one of 50 scientists under age 40 recognized by the World Economic Forum. Her book “How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do—And What It Says About You” exposes linguistic prejudice and that is the reason why I wanted her on the show.

Originally, I was so drawn to her work with kids showing why multilingualism is beneficial for kids and our society as at the time, my kiddo was getting ready to start kindergarten and I was teaching her some basic Cantonese and French (as French is also an official language of Canada). It struck me how Katherine’s work mirrored a lot of how I grew up and wondered how this would impact my own daughter. But then as I poured through the rest of her book, I realized her work lines up exactly with podcasting as well.

You need to share your voice, join the conversation, and contribute to the world’s voices. As I say, there are no mistakes, just open your mouth and try because it’s all a journey. If you don’t try and speak up, how will you learn for the next time? Because there will always be a next time.

If that thought of a next time brings up some fear and other emotions, I’d love for you to join me on my webinar. A reminder that “Master Your Voice to Create Confidence in Your Message” is happening on March 31st. Save your seat and I’ll see you on March 31st!

Links mentioned in the episode:

Connect with Katherine Kinzler on Twittter @K_Kinzler

Read her book! “How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do–And What It Says about You”

Check out Katherine’s work at the Univerity of Chicago: The Development of Social Cognition Laboratory

World Economic Forum “Young Scientist” of 2018: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_YS_Community_Brochure_2018.pdf

Connect with me!

Find more secrets at http://www.VisibleVoicePodcast.com/

Leave me a voicemail through the “Send Voicemail” purple button on the right of your screen.

Email Mary at VisibleVoicePodcast@gmail.com

Engage with the show on Instagram at @VisibleVoicePodcast

To learn more about or work with Mary, click on over at http://www.OrganizedSound.ca.

Our Conversation:

Mary Chan
Thank you so much for coming on the show and being a part of this, I have gone through this huge learning curve. After starting this podcasting business of mine in 2018, I worked in radio, For the longest time for about 20 years and speech and audio was something that’s always been a part of my life. My background is that my mom grew up in Hong Kong. My dad is from China, they immigrated to Canada, the 70s I think it is, but because I was born in Vancouver. You talk a bit about in your research, how our accents are actually formed when we are, we were kids. And so when people don’t see me like in radio and in podcasting, they hear my voice. They think North American. But then when they see me, they’re like, oh, oh you’re Chinese or you know whatever they think I look like. And so, speak a bit about how accents are formed when we are kids and how that all comes together now as we’re adults.

Katherine Kinzler
Well thanks so much for having me. And, you know, I just love hearing people’s backstories, particularly people have these really interesting multilingual, multicultural backgrounds and it’s always interesting to learn their perspectives. That’s exactly right, that a lot of our linguistic settings are set in childhood, and so, of course, we can learn new languages as we get older. We can even change our speech when we’re just talking to someone new or someone we liked and so there’s ways in which our speech is constantly evolving and changing at the same time a lot of what we learn, we learn as children, and often the way we sound sounds like our peers. And so it doesn’t surprise me to hear that you know if you’re growing up in Canada and you’re going to school in Canada, you’re going to sound like other Canadian children despite I don’t know if you’re also learning, you know, multiple languages at home which can be a really wonderful thing.

Mary Chan
Yeah like I, my parents don’t speak English very well even to this day you know they’ve been in the country for over 40 years, and they have an accent, a Chinese accent when they’re speaking. I grew up speaking Cantonese with them. So, you know people are surprised when they hear my Cantonese accent to speak Cantonese, I guess.

Katherine Kinzler
Yeah I talked in the book a bit about my one of my college roommates, Joey whose parents, she also had, it sounds like she had sort of a similar background to yours, you know, and so she was speaking, I believe she had knowledge also of Cantonese and Mandarin, and she learned English in the US and then she would talk about how sometimes when she spoke to her parents. It’s like, you know I can speak to you and describe how I want to brush my teeth, but if I want to say this other concept it’s something I’m an express in English and their language at home would just become really a mix and I think that that’s often really common for people who have this tremendous linguistic diversity and then you speak the way that you need to communicate socially with your parents and with your friends and so when you’re a kid at school, you want to sound like the other kids at school.

Mary Chan
Then how does it work in, the community that I grew up in was right in Chinatown. So if you were Caucasian you were actually the minority. And so there were a lot of other Asian students you know Vietnamese and Filipino, and Laotian, you know, not just from China. And so all the kids in my class basically was English as a second language. So then, how did we not form an accent, quote unquote.

Katherine Kinzler
Right, so I mean of course, everybody, every time you speak, everybody has an accent right so that’s always I think an important thing to add that you know you can’t speak without an accent, it’s the sound of your language, but I think you’re getting it this really fascinating question about human language acquisition that in some way is just so puzzling but yet shows how social language is. And so you’re right, like you’re, you know, imagine this kid who has all of this input say for imagine a parent who’s a non-native speaker of English and you can have all of this input hearing English spoken by a non-native speaker, and then you live in a broader society and go to school where you start to speak English with an accent that sounds like those of your peers, not of your parents. And so I think it shows. It’s about communication, but it’s not just about communicating our words and our thoughts, it’s also about connecting and communicating our social goals.

Mary Chan
Yeah, and that’s one of the things that I am really passionate about now and it’s the exact title of your book, “How You Say It” because the words you use can be construed based on context and tone and intonation. So, describe what you mean, from your perspective about how you say it.

Katherine Kinzler
Sometimes we don’t realize the social power that language has. And so, we might think about language as a way to communicate ideas which it certainly is right and so you know I’m communicating this content to you, but so much about what we pick up in an interaction when you just need someone for a split second, it’s not just about the words that they’re using, it’s also about the way that you speak those words. And so you know, back to your question about childhood, when you speak, you’re often revealing something not just about who you are now, but also about the voices who were speaking to you when you were a child, and it’s so tremendously difficult for us to learn a non-native language into adulthood that, and you know it’s doable and it’s great and I’m a big proponent of language learning so you know for the adults out there who are wondering about if you should learn another language, I think you should. Yet, of course, as anybody who’s tried to learn a language as an adult knows you’re always gonna sound like it’s not a native tongue to you. And so in that sense we open our mouths and we say something, not just about where we currently are and where we’re going, but also about where we’ve been, in some ways that can be a great thing, but in other ways. It can guide so much prejudice and stereotypes about speech where people think that they know someone based on how they sound and often they really don’t.

Mary Chan
Yeah, I get that a lot I remember this early on in my radio career, I was on the air and so people listened to me and I was very cognizant of just using my first name Mary as so people don’t hear the can, my last name being stereotype, Asian and all this sort of stuff, but then I had a what we call a live on location so I was at a grocery store, talking about specials and come on down and somebody came up to me and said, oh you’re married. Oh I thought you were taller, which I never thought about I thought about more about my ethnicity and my race but people were like, Oh no, I thought you were taller. I’m only like five foot one.

Katherine Kinzler
You know, there’s actually these seminal psycholinguistic studies that were done in Canada, wherein the 1960s around Montreal, where people would judge, English speaking Canadians and French-speaking Canadians, and so they would say explicitly that they didn’t really think any difference that there were any differences necessarily between the groups but then they’d hear the voices and I just say your, your comment made me think of these studies because often people would say, oh, no, that first-person sounded which happened to be the English speaker, sounded a lot smarter and taller than the second person so you actually I think people misperceive all sorts of things in the voice including height, which I think might, you know, might co-occur with other kinds of judgments about somebody is abilities say I think that that’s possible, that you know we hear things like tallness in a voice even when that absolutely does not exist and in their voice signal necessarily.

Mary Chan
Yeah. Do you think though maybe a person’s tone like if I spoke more in a lower tone people think I would be taller, versus, I’m going to speak up here and it looks a little higher tone so I might be more petite and small and cute, that sort of thing.

Katherine Kinzler
So, I mean I think it’s possible some of those differences, you know could exist in people’s minds and perhaps even in the world, but you know some of the linguistic studies that have studied this have given us the same person who’s a bilingual. So that same individual with that same vocal tract, you know, is going to produce English and French and they think the English version just sounds taller, which I think reflects something about sociolinguistic stereotypes, as opposed to something you don’t really deeper or high about that one individual voice. So you know often these things, both things can be true right but maybe in the world there’s going to be some co-occurrence, between the way your voice sounds and how tall you are, but then our human brains and psychologies make these leaps in these inferences and they can be based on cultural stereotypes and not necessarily based on reality.

Mary Chan
And I know too, growing up, watched a lot of TV movies in Canada so I was influenced a lot through the media and in your book you have this great example using Disney films, and how the media has spread these biases, even subtle ones, or accents, can you describe more about this research and this topic that you have in your book.

Katherine Kinzler
Kid’s media is so complicated I mean so is adult media. So kids can learn a lot from the media they’re really positive things, of course, at the same time so many biases and prejudices can be revealed in the media and I think that modern kids movies and films are really trying to be a little bit more aware of this, not to say necessarily that they nail it of course in every time, but when you look at older films, researchers have looked at this and found things like, you know protagonists are more likely to speak in a way that’s considered a standard accent or dialect. Bad guys often say, they’re more likely you know relatively more likely to speak in a foreign accent you can find particular co-occurrences between particular accents and dialects with, you know, negative stereotypes that might be portrayed about those groups. And something that I think is important for parents to keep in mind is that, you know, you watch one film, and it’s sometimes a little hard to know what’s going on. Now sometimes prejudice or bias will just be, you know, really blatant and visible but I imagine it’s just one character who happens to speak a certain way, it’s a little hard to know what that means but I would think of kids as being these statistical calculators and cultural sponges that are kind of adding up everything they see. So it’s in one movie the bad guy happens to speak in a certain way. Well, that’s just one instance but if they’re looking, they’re seeing a bunch of different media and that pattern tends to co-occur, that’s absolutely something that they’ll start to pick up on and you know start to interpret as being the truth in the world that they’ve learned.

Mary Chan
Yeah, I totally saw that too, and I always thought I need to speak a certain way, especially if I’m going to go into radio I need to have a radio voice and so podcasters are the same way they think I need to have a podcasting voice. I have this heavy accent so I can’t be understood by listeners. What research, have you seen about how accents, heavy accents can still be comprehended by a listener.

Katherine Kinzler
Yeah, and just the notion of, I want to kind of unpack the idea of a heavy accent, and understood. So those sound like really easy terms, but actually there’s research suggesting that a lot of this is kind of in people’s perception of truth as opposed to any actual reality. So you know I think sometimes we think, okay, this person has, you know, an easy to understand accent this person has a heavy accent that’s hard to understand, but you can have a bunch of listeners that would listen to the same speech and come up with different intuition. So even a notion of who has a heavy accent is somewhat subjective and not everybody agrees when they listen. The other thing is often we underestimate our ability to understand and so we can hear somebody and say oh that’s really under, you know, hard to understand other people won’t understand them either. And actually if people are given a more objective measure of comprehension like write down what they said you know or answer questions about what they said they absolutely can do it. I think that you know it’s not to say that there aren’t people don’t, you know, comprehend, different voices differently their time absolutely be a processing cost if you’re listening to speech that you’re unfamiliar with. At the same time, often it’s not so great, and I think that we really think about speech, we worry too much and we should worry less about comprehension and so much of it is, can be a feeling of anxiety that people won’t understand me and that can really be perpetuated by a culture that says that there’s good ways to talk and less good means to talk, but that actually people can be understood, and that’s an important message to have out there.

Mary Chan
Yeah and I think a lot of people when they think of accents, they think of cultural accents, but there’s also like regional accents. You know, for example, Southern accents or black vernacular, versus the standard versus North American whatever standard is North American accent. So I find too in the podcasting space there is a lot of prejudice, attached to speech. And so, communication really is also both the listener and not just the speaker, can you speak more to that.

Katherine Kinzler
So I suppose some of these studies you know we’re talking about objective versus subjective measures of comprehension and a lot of it seems subjective. And then furthermore, a lot of it seems to be driven by the listener, not just the speaker. So I think we have this idea I think kind of what you’re suggesting is, it’s like, some people are good communicators and some people are bad wives and so you’re making your podcast or you’re speaking to somebody or you’re on a job interview and you’re putting your speech out there and you know it was either good or bad or understood or not it’s kind of like your fault. You did it, but actually a lot of it is the role of the listener. And so there are studies that put a listener, with a speaker and find that so much of communication is two-sided and reciprocal. So you know that might be a little different in the podcasting context where you don’t see this two-sided exchange right somebody is not a listener, you know, listening to you while they walk to work, say is not going to be able to ask you questions back. However, whether or not they understand you and each with the material absolutely is about the listener and when two people are talking when somebody kind of leans in and asked follow up questions and engages the speaker becomes better at communicating better at conveying their ideas because the listeners really engaging. And so, so much of communication is two-sided and not just about whether one person is a good communicator or not.

Mary Chan
Yeah, and that’s one of the things that I am putting out there too as podcasters, we can create some of that social change, because we are using our voices and when we’re showing other people that you have a voice, people want to listen to you and if you have that accent, people might connect with you more because they too have that same accent and they can connect with you more emotionally through your voice.

Katherine Kinzler
I think that’s fine. I think that’s a great message to convey.

Mary Chan
How do you think podcasters as a social group create that language change?

Katherine Kinzler
I mean I think talking about these issues is really important. I also think hearing a diversity of voices is really important, and so you know if you’re bringing on guests that thinking about diversity in the way that people sound I think that’s a really admirable and important goal.

Mary Chan
That’s such a good point too, it’s not just about you as a podcaster, but the people you bring on and how they speak as well and what they’re saying. So, to wrap up, what would you say to a potential podcaster who is hesitant to speak up because of how they speak?

Katherine Kinzler
I think so many people feel a sense of insecurity about their voices about their voice or how it sounds or how somebody else will hear you know, and yet, being able to have a voice and join a conversation and have your ideas out there is so important and empowering and so I think both realizing that your feelings of insecurity are shared by so many others can be helpful. And then also, you know, trying your best to contribute to the world’s voices.