Swedish is beautiful, Danish is ugly? Investigating the link between language attitudes and intelligibility

This paper investigates the hypothesis that attitudes towards a linguistic variety and intelligibility of that variety are linked. This is done by eliciting language attitudes and word recognition scores in 154 Danish and Swedish schoolchildren and adolescents between 7 and 16 years. Language attitudes towards the neighboring language are elicited by means of a matched-guise experiment while word recognition is tested by auditorily presenting the participants with 50 spoken stimuli in their neighboring language (Danish for Swedish children and vice versa) in a picture-pointing task. Results revealed that while Danish children held more positive attitudes towards Swedish than vice versa and their word recognition scores were generally higher than those of their Swedish peers, the correlation between these two variables is very low, indicating that the two variables are only loosely linked

Untangling Linguistic Salience

The concept of linguistic salience is broadly used within sociolinguistics to account for processes as diverse as language change (Kerswill & Williams, 2002) and language acquisition (Ellis, 2016) in that salient forms are e.g. more likely to undergo change, or are often acquired earlier than other features. However, the meaning of salience is “notoriously difficult to quantify” (Hickey, 2000, p. 57) and definitions of the term given in the literature often differ to such a degree that one could dispute whether the concept of salience has explanatory value (cf. Rácz, 2013). Accordingly, what makes a particular linguistic feature salient is contested: some argue that salience can be defined by linguistic traits such as loudness, high word-frequency, or a greater articulatory effort, whereas others argue that salience is a result of associations with social factors (cf. Kerswill & Williams, 2002). In a pilot study, we used eye-tracking to collect pupil dilation data while participants listened to spoken samples that were hypothesized to be either salient or not. These differences in salience were based on notions taken from the literature and included traits such as acoustical prominence, gender violations, loudness and differing realizations of the consonants /r/ and /v/. We were able to show that pupil size increased significantly for salient variables in the categories acoustic prominence, gender and loudness, pointing towards an increase in brain activity for these variables. In this poster, we propose to untangle how the concept is used. To those ends, we conducted a review of the literature on salience and identified different ways of operationalizing it. We conclude by discussing how salience could be decomposed in terms of other notions such as frequency, surprisal and markedness. We then propose a series of experiments using eye-tracking and ERP experiments

Salience is in the eye of the beholder:Increased pupil size reflects acoustically salient variables

‘Salience’ is a term frequently used in linguistics but an exact definition for the concept is lacking. Recent technological advances which allow us to explore the cognitive processing of so-called salient linguistic features could provide us with quantifiable measures of ‘salience’, and lead to a further understanding of the concept and its relationship to language acquisition and change. In this paper we measure pupil dilation with the assumption that auditory salience results in a change in pupil size, as an effect of cognitive load. We report an experimental study observing Dutch participants' pupil sizes when listening to stimuli containing salient and non-salient variants of linguistic variables (e.g. Dutch coda/r/; speech intensity, word frequency). Using Generalized Additive Mixed Modelling (GAMM), we find pupil size increases for three of six stimuli categories. We consider our findings in light of the speech processing literature, address the (dis)advantages of the technique, and formulate some recommendations for future advances in neurophysiological measures in (socio)linguistics