Social Salience and the Sociolinguistic Monitor: A Case Study of ING and TH-fronting in Britain

This article examines the role of social salience, or the relative ability of a linguistic variable to evoke social meaning, in structuring listeners’ perceptions of quantitative sociolinguistic distributions. Building on the foundational work of Labov et al. (2006, 2011) on the “sociolinguistic monitor” (a proposed cognitive mechanism responsible for sociolinguistic perception), we examine whether listeners’ evaluative judgments of speech change as a function of the type of variable presented. We consider two variables in British English, ING and TH-fronting, which we argue differ in their relative social salience. Replicating the design of Labov et al.’s studies, we test 149 British listeners’ reactions to different quantitative distributions of these variables. Our experiments elicit a very different pattern of perceptual responses than those reported previously. In particular, our results suggest that a variable’s social salience determines both whether and how it is perceptually evaluated. We argue that this finding is crucial for understanding how sociolinguistic information is cognitively processed

Effects of Dialect on Merger Perception: ERP and Behavioral Correlates

Native speakers of a language are often unable to consciously perceive, and have altered neural responses to, phonemic contrasts not present in their language. This study examined whether speakers of dialects of the same language with different phoneme inventories also show measurably different neural responses to contrasts not present in their dialect. Speakers with (n = 11) and without (n = 11) an American English I/E (pin/pen) vowel merger in speech production were asked to discriminate perceptually between minimal pairs of words that contrasted in the critical vowel merger and minimal pairs of control words while their event-related potential (ERPs) were recorded. Compared with unmerged dialect speakers, merged dialect speakers were less able to make behavioral discriminations and exhibited a reduced late positive ERP component (LPC) effect to incongruent merger vowel stimuli. These results indicate that between dialects of a single language, the behavioral response differences may reflect neural differences related to conscious phonological decision processes

A reader in sociophonetics /

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.Introduction: sociophonetic studies of language variety production and perception / Dennis R. Preston, Nancy Niedzielski -- Studies of production. The peripatetic history of Middle English / Alice Faber, Marianna Di Paolo, Catherine T. Best -- Social and phonetic conditioners on the frequency and degree of 'intrusive /r/' in New Zealand English / Jen Hay and Margaret Maclagan -- Effects of consonantal context on the pronunciation of /ae/ in the English of speakers of Mexican heritage from south central Michigan / Rebecca Roeder -- Rhythm types and the speech of working-class youth in a banlieue of Paris: The role of vowel elision and devoicing / Zsuzsanna Fagyal -- The sociophonetics of prosodic contours on NEG in three language communities: teasing apart sociolinguistic and phonetic influences on speech / Malcah Yaeger-Dror ... [et al.] -- An emerging gender difference in Japanese vowel devoicing / Terumi Imai --^Studies of perception. Regional stereotypes and the perception of Japanese vowel devoicing / Midori Yonezawa Morris -- Phonetic detail, linguistic experience, and the classification of regional language varieties in the United States / Cynthia G. Clopper -- Perceptions of /a/-fronting across two Michigan dialects / Bartek Plichta and Brad Rakerd -- Belle's body just caught the fit gnat: the perception of Northern Cities Shifted vowels by local speakers / Dennis R. Preston -- Linguistic security, ideology, and vowel perception / Nancy Niedzielski -- Identification of African American speech / Erik R. Thomas, Norman E. Lass, Jeannine Carpenter -- Studies of perception and production. Phonetic detail in the perception of ethnic varieties of US English / Thomas Purnell -- Sound judgements: perception of indexical features in children's speech / Paul Foulkes ... [et al.] -- Avant-garde Dutch: a perceptual, acoustic and evaluational study / Renée van Bezooijen and Vincent J. van Heuven --^Aspects of the acoustic analysis of imitation / Betsy E. Evans -- The cycle of production, ideology, and perception in the speech of Memphis, Tennessee / Valerie Fridland