DISCOURSE MARKER LIKE IN REAL Time: CHARACTERIZING THE Time-Course OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC IMPRESSION FORMATION

Abstract

Discourse marker like (DMl) is recognized as a highly stigmatized feature of American english, one with strong ideological ties to inarticulate, "Valley girl" speech. Previous work suggests that individual listeners form impressions that both reference and perpetuate DMl's status, as DMl-containing speech is judged as friendlier and less intelligent than controls. Though informative, such studies cannot speak to the magnitude and/or stability of DMl-based impressions nor to the potential interactions between said effects and individual processing styles. The current study continuously measures real-time listener evaluations of speech samples differing only by a single use of DMl using a dynamic motion-capture interface. it also integrates a measure of participants' social interaction preferences and cognitive flexibility, thus assessing the influence of individual differences on participants' moment-by-moment impression formation. our results indicate that DMl has an initial negative effect on both friendliness and intelligence ratings. While the "unfriendly" perception is relatively transient, the "unintelligent" evaluation persists and intensifies over time. individuals with relatively high levels of social aptitude and/or cognitive flexibility are largely responsible for these trends. Collectively, these results offer a preliminary characterization of the sociocognitive interplay between individual, interpersonal, and societal influences on attitude formation.

Real-time speaker evaluation: How useful is it, and what does it measure? Supplemental Materials

“…These open questions have prompted recent work exploring in-the-moment rating tasks, in which listener responses are collected during-rather than after-the speech stimulus (Hesson & Shellgren 2015, Montgomery & Moore 2018. While this work has reported interesting and interpretable results, we cannot know how much to trust these tools without first establishing the accuracy and precision of in-the-moment results.…”

“…Duration appears to play so little a role in the assessment that most participants prefer longer unpleasant experiences if they include even a slight decrease in discomfort at the end of the session (Kahneman 1999). This suggests that one of the first steps in pursu-ing continuous speaker evaluations is to probe the relationship between in-the-moment and end-of-stimulus evaluations, testing the assumption found throughout sociolinguistic work that the final rating via the continuous metric is equivalent to a holistic poststimulus evaluation (Hesson & Shellgren 2015, Jones 2016, Labov et al 2011. By comparing in-the-moment and after-the-fact ratings, we might also be able to clarify whether in-the-moment and after-the-fact tasks both tap into similar person-perception processes.…”

“…Other recent studies have probed the time course of sociolinguistic evaluation by developing tools for capturing responses as the stimulus unfolds. Hesson and Shellgren (2015), using a two-dimensional schema on an electronic drawing pad, found lower friendly and intelligent ratings immediately after a token of discourse marker like. The friendliness effect dissipated, while the effect on intelligence persisted and even grew over the course of a stimulus, suggesting that after-the-fact ratings may fail to capture some sociolinguistic percepts.…”

Discourse Markers Activate Their, Like, Cohort Competitors

“…However, despite its widespread usage, little is known about how listeners process DM like in online word recognition. Most of the studies investigating the perception of DM like have focused on metalinguistic judgments or impressions, arguing that the use of DM like makes the speaker sound more friendly (Dailey-O'Cain, 2000) yet also less intelligent compared to controls (Fox Tree, 2006;Hesson & Shellgren, 2015). Similarly, overuse of DM like at job interviews reduces applicants' chances of success (Russell et al, 2008).…”

Genre and linguistic expectation shift: Evidence from pop song lyrics

“…The overarching question for the present study is: How does social context contribute to how morphosyntactic dialect variants are processed and comprehended? This question relates to experimental work investigating the social evaluation of morphosyntactic variants (Squires 2013; Hesson & Shellgren 2015; Levon & Buchstaller 2015), but is about the inverse relationship—not how social perceptions are triggered by variants, but how the processing and comprehension of variants is affected by social information. While work on the influence of social/contextual information on speech (phonological) production and perception is now robust (see recently Sanchez, Hay, & Nilson 2015; Hay, Podlubny, Drager, & McAuliffe 2017), research into morphological or syntactic processing/perception remains limited to a few studies (Squires 2013, 2014a,b, 2016; Weatherholz, Campbell-Kibler, & Jaeger 2014; Seifeldin, Cantor, Boland, & Brennan 2015).…”