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"Please call Stella": A diverse look at a single recitation

4 June 2010

As researchers, we may (rightly or wrongly) assume that if we give a set of instructions, the outcomes will be uniform. Or if we talk about terms such as ‘education’ or ‘childhood’, these ideas will also be consistent across an audience.

However, as we work more not only across international boundaries but also across a broad selection of cultures within our own countries, we know that results from what we may think are simple questions or tasks can be widely varied.

A beautifully rich example of this is George Mason University’s ‘Speech Accent Archive’. The premise is simple: English speakers around the world are asked to read a paragraph:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

The results are strangely hypnotic – like an aural lava lamp. As one clicks across the atlas to see how people around the world recite this paragraph, one can see how richly diverse are the results from a simple instruction of reading a paragraph aloud.

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