Listeners’ perception of sound changes with strong socio-indexical associations can be influenced by priming them with social information about the speaker. It is not clear, however, whether this occurs for sociolinguistic variables that pass below the level of conscious awareness. This article hence investigates whether visual speaker gender affects the perception of GOOSE-fronting in Standard Southern British English, which is a sound change that is led by young women, yet does not index stereotypical social characteristics. Participants completed a word identification experiment based on a synthesised FLEECE-GOOSE continuum produced by a gender-ambiguous voice while exposed to an image of a male or female face. Only male listeners identified more fronted tokens as GOOSE when the face in the image was female. The findings suggest that a variable’s social meanings and salience may vary between groups of listeners, while also highlighting the need for good analytical practice when conducting priming experiments.

Sociolinguistic research has established that glottal realisations of the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ have become increasingly common in accents of British English. The phenomenon, known as T-glottalling, encompasses the production of word-final and word-medial /t/ using glottal articulations, including creaky voice, pre-glottalisation [ʔt] and glottal replacement [ʔ] (Straw & Patrick, 2007), so that words such as but [bʌt] and butter [bʌtə] may become [bʌʔ] and [bʌʔə] respectively. The change has been documented for some time in Scotland (Macafee, 1997) and Norfolk (Trudgill, 1999) but has since been reported in numerous locations across the UK (see Smith & Holmes–Elliott, 2018 for a recent review). Studies of regional dialect levelling (Kerswill, 2003) have argued that T-glottalling has spread from working-class London speech into neighbouring varieties of South East England and beyond as a form of geographical diffusion (Altendorf & Watt, 2004). Together with other variables showing similar sociolinguistic patterns, such as TH-fronting and L vocalisation, it has been identified as part of a set of ‘youth norms’ used by young people in many urban centres to index a trendy, youthful identity (Williams & Kerswill, 1999; Milroy, 2007; though see Watson, 2006 for an exception in Liverpool), which have elsewhere been referred to as ‘Estuary English’ (Rosewarne, 1984; Altendorf, 2017). In terms of perception, T-glottalling is described as highly salient and stigmatised, frequently attracting comments from lay speakers to the effect that it should be avoided (Wells, 1982; Bennett, 2012), to the extent that mainstream journalistic publications can identify and criticise its use by ‘educated’ speakers such as politicians (e.g. Littlejohn, 2011).

Listeners’ perceptions of sound changes may be influenced by priming them with social information about the speaker. It is not clear, however, whether this occurs for sociolinguistic variables that pass below the level of awareness. This article investigates whether visual speaker gender affects the perception of goose-fronting in Standard Southern British English, a sound change that is led by young women yet does not fulfil criteria for sociolinguistic salience. Participants from across the United Kingdom completed a word identification experiment based on a gender-ambiguous synthesized fleece-goose continuum while primed with an image of a man’s or a woman’s face. The study did not find a significant main effect of priming, but men identified fronter tokens as goose when primed with a woman’s face. I argue that sociolinguistic priming effects may be over-stated and that future priming experiments should be designed with maximal statistical power where possible.

Social class is one of the key axes of sociolinguistic variation, but the speech of those at the top of the class spectrum-the elite-is rarely studied. While T-glottalling has spread widely across British English accents, a competing variant-T-tapping-has attracted little scholarly attention in the United Kingdom. This article presents a study of elite speech by examining sociolinguistic variation in T-tapping among adolescent speakers of Standard Southern British English. Data were collected from interviews with teenagers aged 16-19 at two schools in Hampshire, UK. T-tapping is led by those who previously attended private school and is used more by boys than girls in formal speech. The findings suggest that T-tapping may be used to index a combination of authority and informality, which is invoked by elite speakers to assert themselves from a position of privilege while maintaining an image of openness and approachability.