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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1046

Part of Session 171: Experimental methods in the study of social meaning (Other abstracts in this session)

Social salience and the sociolinguistic monitor: an investigation of (ING) and (TH)-fronting

Authors: Levon, Erez (1); Fox, Sue (2)
Submitted by: Levon, Erez (Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom)

As part of the goal of understanding how language is perceived in its social context, sociolinguists have begun to investigate listeners’ perceptual sensitivity to the quantitative distributions of socially meaningful forms. In particular, Labov et al. (2011) examine the extent to which the frequency of occurrence of a variant impacts upon a listener’s affective reactions to a speaker. In their work, Labov et al. argue for the existence of what they call a sociolinguistic monitor- a cognitive mechanism that governs frequency-linked perceptual awareness. In this paper, we seek to assess the generalizability of Labov et al.’s claims regarding the sociolinguistic monitor by testing its operation on two variables in a British context. Our goal in doing so is to provide a theoretically and socially more nuanced account of how the monitor may function.

We report the results of two perception experiments. Experiment 1 is an exact replication of Labov et al.’s original study, where we examined listeners’ perceptual sensitivity to the (ING) variable (or the alternation between a final alveolar [n] and a final velar [ŋ] at the end of multisyllabic words such as walking; e.g., Trudgill 1974). The same experimental protocols were followed, with a set of 7 resynthesised stimuli derived from the speech of a woman from the Southeast of England and controlled for the variable realisation of (ING) presented to a group of British listeners. Results from 57 respondents yield very different findings from those found in the US study, with listeners showing no sensitivity to alternate realisations of the (ING) variable. We suggest that these findings support previous production-based claims that the variable (ING) might not be viewed as a linguistic stereotype in British English (e.g., Tagliamonte 2004) and hence is not visible to the sociolinguistic monitor, which we hypothesize is not sensitive to less socially-marked variables (i.e., indicators or markers).

To test this hypothesis, Experiment 2 examines listeners’ perceptual reactions to a more clearly “stereotypical” feature of British English: TH-fronting, or the labio-dental realisation of the inter-dental fricatives (e.g., fink for think; Kerswill 2003). The same experimental protocols were again followed, with a set of 7 resynthesised stimuli derived from the speech of the same woman from the Southeast of England and controlled for the variable occurrence of TH-fronting presented to a new group of British listeners. Preliminary results from 38 respondents thus far demonstrate a significant split in the listener population. Listeners from the South of England (where TH-fronting is widespread) show no perceptual sensitivity to frequency of occurrence of the labio-dental variants. In contrast, listeners from the North of England, where TH-fronting is less common, seem to be highly attuned to the frequency of these forms and significantly downgrade their perceptions of the speaker’s “professionalism” as a function of labio-dental frequency. We argue that these findings support the hypothesis that the monitor is sensitive only to stereotypes, and may also indicate a further influence of listener exposure and/or attitudes on sociolinguistic processing more broadly.