A further comment on voice and race in Cardiff

I see the main point of Giles and Bourhis’ papers on voice and racial categorization as reporting evidence for linguistic assimilation to local U.K. White patterns far beyond what American studies indicate. We cannot strictly compare the U.S.A. results with theirs because of racial set in the American studies, so how those would have turned out, with ethnic categorization embedded among other judgments is unknown. I do not agree with Giles and Bourhis (1982), though, that their task was particularly complex, or that anyway that would make it immune to the suggested bias, which I view not as the sole determinant of subjects’ decisions but as plausible, and enough to explain the extensive mis-categorization of Black speakers. The intrusion of precisely such “simple” processes into social judgment helps make it “complex”.