Processing Grammatical Differences: Perceiving versus Noticing

What the Heck Is Salience? How Predictive Language Processing Contributes to Sociolinguistic Perception

“…Since the expectations that determine the surprisal of a lectal variant reflect the individual's previous language experience, it naturally follows that initial salience can be “different for different social groups” (Kerswill and Williams, 2002 ) and individuals (see also Hickey, 2000 ; Campbell-Kibler, 2012 ). Specifically, initial salience should depend on which lects the individual has previously been exposed to, the frequency of the novel lectal variant in those familiar lect, and perhaps the frequency of similar variants in familiar lects (see Squires, 2014b ). Next we turn to the question of how the initial salience of a variant is related to the probability that the variant will become associated with the lect, thereby acquiring social meaning.…”

“…This awareness in turn is attributed to the salience of these variables, such that greater salience is assumed to cause greater meta-linguistic awareness (e.g., Trudgill, 1986 ). Salience has similarly been invoked when aiming to explain implicit social inferences about, or attitudes toward, speakers who exhibit certain variables in their speech (Babel, 2016 ; Drager and Kirtley, 2016 ; Squires, 2016 ). However, salience is a hard to define concept (for review, see Auer et al, 1998 ; Kerswill and Williams, 2002 ) and, partly as a consequence, “notoriously difficult to quantify” (Hickey, 2000 ).…”

Evaluating S(c)illy voices: The effects of salience, stereotypes, and co-present language variables on real-time reactions to regional speech

“…23 Of course, some parts of our analysis are partial; our click data showed where features were noticed by listeners, and consequently, in the review task, listeners can only have commented on features of which they were consciously aware (cf. Squires 2016). Nonetheless, we contend that this method affords the possibility of further exploring the social meaning of salient features (especially when listeners are presented with naturally occurring speech) due to the ability to link a definite event (a mouse click) to a feature's occurrence in time, and to use listeners' review comments to support the links between clicks and features.…”

The role of linguistic ideologies in language contact situations

“…It is worth noting that perceived similarity does not necessarily imply awareness—that is, speakers may not be conscious of the fact that they are “building bridges” between the linguistic systems at their disposal. An analysis of perceived similarity at a micro level also requires that we operationalize different levels of awareness, such as perception (implicit knowledge) and noticing (explicit knowledge; Squires, ), a topic explored more thoroughly below.…”