The nature of sociolinguistic perception

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis study investigates how linguistic variation carries social meaning, examining the impact of the English variable (ING) on perceptions of eight speakers from the U.S. West Coast and South. Thirty-two excerpts of spontaneous speech were digitally manipulated to vary only in tokens of (ING) and used to collect listener perceptions in group interviews (N ¼ 55) and an experiment (N ¼ 124). Interview data and experimental results show that (ING) impacts social perception variably, inhabiting an indexical field of related meanings (Eckert, Penelope. [2008]. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):453-476). One of these meanings, intelligence/education, is explored in detail to understand how a given meaning is realized or not in a specific context. Speakers were heard as less educated/intelligent when they used -in, but this effect is driven by reactions to speakers heard as aregional and not as working-class. Some implications on our future understanding of the processing of socially laden variation are discussed.In recent years, variationist research has devoted increasing attention to the concept of social meaning, the idea that speakers and listeners use linguistic structures to carry social information and thus shape the situations and larger societal structures in which they participate. The link between social positioning and linguistic choices has been well established from early in the field (Labov, 1963), and our understanding of social meaning has expanded more recently. Still, little is known about how listeners realize social meaning, how they receive sociolinguistic cues, and what they do with them. The essence of the claim that variation carries social meaning is that it connects speaker and hearer in social communication, making sociolinguistic comprehension basic to an understanding of what exactly social meaning is and how it is constructed on a minute-to-minute basis.This article examines how listeners incorporate social information from a single variable into perceptions of speakers on the basis of brief but content-rich linguistic stimuli. I will present data from a matched guise study of the English variable (ING) (the alternation at the end of multisyllabic words between word-final [ɪn] or [ən], here referred to as -in and [ɪŋ], called -ing). This study manipulated (ING) in examples of spontaneous speech from eight speakers varied by gender and I would like to thank Penelope Eckert for her invaluable advice on the development of this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Diphthongized (en) and the indexation of femininity and Paulistanity

“…First, considering that Lucas had previously been picked out of a pool of 30 Paulistano men as sounding particularly effeminate, while Robson was picked out as sounding particularly masculine (MENDES 2016), one could argue that diphthongized (en) "adds" to Lucas's feminine-soundingness, but doesn't change the perception that Robson sounds masculine. This consideration parallels the hypotheses tested (and to a certain extent confirmed) by CampbellKibler (2008, 2009), Pharao et al (2011 and Levon (2014). Even though their specific methods and variables differ, these authors essentially discuss a similar idea: that the social meaning of variation is, itself, variable, and is context-, listenerand speaker-dependent.…”

Exploring the relationship between production and perception in the mid front vowels of U.S. English

“…For example, it is clear from Dennis Preston's work on perceptual dialectology that regional differences are highly salient and that speakers show little hesitation assigning wide-ranging social traits such as differing levels of pleasantness and correctness to speakers they perceive as regionally divergent (Preston, 1989(Preston, , 1993. Similarly, a number of other studies have also illustrated how social meaning and language forms are related (Baker et al, 2009;Baugh, 2000;Bayard et al, 2001;Campbell-Kibler, 2007, 2009, 2010Fridland et al, 2004Fridland et al, , 2005Graff et al, 1986;Hay and Drager, 2010;Plichta and Preston, 2005;Purnell et al, 1999). Beyond such studies on social perceptions, there has also been some work investigating the perception of linguistic form, with most of these suggesting that social differences across listeners and/or speakers influence the way they perceive stimuli of varying kinds (e.g.…”

The Implicit Association Test and sociolinguistic meaning

“…(ING) was chosen for this project because it has been extensively studied across the English-speaking world and shown to carry similar associations across a wide range of communities (for an overview, see Hazen, 2005). It also has been well represented in the literature on social perception of variation (Campbell-Kibler, 2007, 2009Labov et al, 2006a). In the US, (ING) is tied to region, with -in form more prevalent in the South (Hazen, 2008) and strongly associated in the popular imagination (Campbell-Kibler, 2007) with the Southern accent, which itself is the most well-known accent in the country (Lippi-Green, 1997; Preston, 1997).…”