Individual Sensitivity to the Frequency of Socially Meaningful Linguistic Cues Affects Language Attitudes

Abstract

In forming an impression of a speaker, listeners are attentive to the frequency of nonstandard language features, using it to calibrate their judgments. We show that the ability to track and socially evaluate nonstandard variant frequency is subject to individual differences. Listeners judged an aspiring newscaster on the standardness of her speech in a series of read-aloud passages that had been manipulated for proportional frequency of a nonstandard pronunciation. Judgments of conditions at the poles of the frequency continuum were predicted by listener sociodemographic factors. For conditions in the middle of the frequency continuum, listener judgments were predicted by Broader Autism Phenotype Questionnaire scores for communication skills. Language attitudes may therefore be affected by both social and cognitive listener attributes, where cognitive attributes are most relevant for ambiguous inputs.

Style dominance: Attention, audience, and the ‘real me’

“…The typology opens up questions for further research, many paralleling questions in bilingualism: Do some individuals have no underlying vernacular, just a constellation of styles with equal cognitive ease of access and articulatory control? To what extent is dominance affected by factors of age of acquisition (Fix 2013), frequency of use, aptitude (Wagner & Hesson 2014), or attitude? Can a later-learned style become the cognitive default?…”

Perception, cognition, and linguistic structure: The effect of linguistic modularity and cognitive style on sociolinguistic processing

“…To test listeners' sensitivity to phonetic versus grammatical variability, we designed an experimental task modeled on Labov et al's (2011) “newscast” paradigm (see also Levon & Fox, 2014; Wagner & Hesson, 2014). In this type of study, listeners are presented with multiple recordings of the same speaker reading a sample news broadcast.…”

“…On the other hand, there are good reasons to assume that it may in fact be the rarity of, for example, a double negative that draws listeners' attention to certain (morpho)syntactic forms, which then results in the variants taking on social meaning (see Buchstaller, 2009; Hoffman, 2004; Podesva, 2011). Finally, sociocognitive approaches to the Interface Principle have been formulated via the sociolinguistic monitor, a cognitive mechanism that is hypothesized to govern frequency-linked perceptual awareness (Labov, 1993; Labov et al, 2011; Levon & Fox, 2014; Wagner & Hesson, 2014). According to this heuristic, listeners track the speech signal for socially meaningful cues among alternate ways of saying the same thing, and they evaluate them against the listener's stored social meaning for these cues.…”

“…First, the belief that we can model listeners' perceptual capacity based on patterns of speech production alone relies on a model of sociolinguistic cognition that views linguistic practice as a direct reflex of underlying evaluations. There is, however, a growing body of evidence from both social psychology and sociolinguistics that the relationship between evaluation and behavior is mediated by various external factors, including listener attitudes, speech context, and individual cognitive style (see, e.g., Preston, 2011; Wagner & Hesson, 2014). Second, the empirical findings of production research do not consistently support the claims of the Interface Principle.…”

Situating sociolinguistics: Coupland –Theoretical Debates

“…Labov et al. ; Wagner and Hesson ; Levon and Buchstaller ). These studies and others like them have contributed directly to the elaboration of the very notion of construal that Silverstein, Eckert and Gal all identify as crucial to the further development of sociolinguistic theory.…”