Sociophonetics: The Role of Words, the Role of Context, and the Role of Words in Context

Abstract

This paper synthesizes a wide range of literature from sociolinguistics and cognitive psychology, to argue for a central role for the "word" as a vehicle of language variation and change. Three crucially interlinked strands of research are reviewed-the role of context in associative learning, the word-level storage of phonetic and contextual detail, and the phonetic consequences of skewed distributions of words across different contexts. I argue that the human capacity for associative learning, combined with attention to fine-phonetic detail at the level of the word, plays a significant role in predicting a range of subtle but systematically robust observed socioindexical patterns in speech production and perception.

Back From the Future: Nonlinear Anticipation in Adults' and Children's Speech

“…As highlighted in the previous section, well-defined relations between degree of gestural overlap and phonological organization have been hard to establish across developmental studies. Note that similar questions exist at the perception and representation level; however, those fall out of this study's scope (for a discussion of those, see for instance Hay, 2018). There are probably many reasons for the inconsistencies in these findings; some are obviously methodological, including large heterogeneity in experimental designs, stimuli, and analyses employed.…”

“…A lot more work is needed to disentangle maturational processes from social and environmental aspects, all of which interact in fundamental ways to shape language acquisition. In the last decade, assessing the role of experience in social interaction and, more specifically, its contribution to shaping production and perception mechanisms have been two major foci in sociophonetics (e.g., reviews in Foulkes & Hay, 2015;Hay, 2018). Because anticipation is largely related to feedforward representations, which in turn are driven by the (sensory) information drawn from past experiences, future studies looking at its maturation in childhood should greatly benefit from research, the primary interest of which is to describe speech in its natural communicative context.…”

Spoken Language Development and the Challenge of Skill Integration

“…It is hence not surprising that correlations between age and phonological awareness were found in our studyalbeit not with all PA tasks and not with vocabulary. However, while age-based descriptions of language acquisition may be interpreted in the perspective of biologically-driven developments, it may instead be the effect of experience upon the learning mechanism (i.e., the exposure to and practice speaking the language) that gives maturation its transformational power (e.g., in perception: Kuhl et al, 1992;Hay, 2018). Uncovering how experience shapes (spoken) language acquisition independent of age has been not only thrilling but also enduring challenge for psycholinguists because experience unfolds within an extended time scale and results from multiple interactions in a continuously variable environment that remains difficult to replicate in lab environments.…”

Editors’ Introduction and Review: Sociolinguistic Variation and Cognitive Science

“…Through synthesizing a range of work, Hay () argues in this volume that the cognitive representations of sounds and words are linked with one another, and that their representations and subsequent processing of those representations are affected by experience with the sounds in the contexts in which they frequently appear. Results from two further papers in this issue lend further support to Hay's arguments: Sóskuthy, Foulkes, Hughes, and Haddican () demonstrate that the realization of one phonetic variable is linked with the word it occurs in and whether a second phonetic variable can be found in that word.…”