Campbell Kibler 2010

Language and Linguistics Compass 3/1 (2010): 1–13, 10.1111/j..2010.00201.
1
2
3
PE: Sharanya
Sociolinguistics and Perception
CE: Shantha
4
5
6 Kathryn Campbell-Kibler*
7 Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University
8
9
No. of pages: 13
10 Abstract
11 The social perception and evaluation of language are key elements in sociolinguistic phenomena.
Toc head: Original Article

12 While perceptual studies have long played a role in the study of linguistic variation, they have not
13 enjoyed central status, in contrast to their widespread use in the field of language attitudes.
14 Recently, however, interest in the perceptual study of variation has grown. Three threads of
Dispatch: 23.2.10
15 research on sociolinguistic perception are discussed: the social and affective evaluation of language,
16 the identification of social information from speech and the influence of social information on
17 linguistic comprehension. Finally, methodological and theoretical developments within the field of
variation are explored that place perceptual studies at the heart of the variationist enterprise.
18
19
20
21 2 1. Introduction
22
Sociolinguistic variationists study the relationships between structured differences in
B
23
language behavior and other social behaviors and structures. Having grown out of the
24
fields of historical linguistics and dialectology, variationists are particularly interested in
1
25
Manuscript No.
the ways that language changes over time and how those changes lead to different
26
0
languages and language varieties across space. Variationists have added another important
27
dimension, however, asking how language spreads and changes through not only time
2
28
and geographic space, but social space as well, with respect to social structures like socio-
29
economic status, age, gender and race, as well as more local and idiosyncratic social
30
features (e.g. goth, Talmudic scholar, yuppie, burnout).
31
Understanding how language is tied to social space requires understanding not only of
32
how people talk, but how they hear language as well. In his foundational work, Labov
33
L N C 3
Journal Name
(1966) pioneered a specific set of methods designed to study the use and evaluation of
34
speech forms within a speech community. These methods included tools for collecting
35
examples of speech, as well as carefully controlled social evaluation data. The latter is
36
crucial, as Labov places evaluation at the very heart of his enterprise, defining a speech
37
community based not on speech behavior but on shared evaluational norms (Labov
38
1972). In the years following, his tools for capturing speech production, including the
39
selection of informants and the manipulation of formality known as the sociolinguistic
40
interview, became central features of the new field of variation. Indeed, for many, the
41
use of these techniques, particularly the sociolinguistic interview, continues to be a defin-
42
ing characteristic of the project of variation (Tagliamonte 2006). In contrast, his tools for
43
subjective evaluation have not enjoyed the same success. Perception studies have been
44
ongoing, but not central, tools in the field, although other fields, particularly that of
45
language attitudes, have flourished based largely on perceptual tasks.
46
In recent years, however, a number of factors have combined to bring perceptual work
47
into a more prominent role within variation (see Thomas 2002). This article will describe
48
the contributions of perception studies to variationist concerns and discuss open questions
49
ª 2010 The Author

Journal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
2 Kathryn Campbell-Kibler
1 and future directions. It is important to clarify first, however, what sense of perception is
2 intended. Within sociolinguistics and elsewhere, the term perceptual is often used to refer
3 to beliefs or ideologies that people hold on a given topic. It is this sense of perception
4 used in, for example, perceptual dialectology (Preston 1989), that investigates the models
5 that regular speakers have of regional language variation. While this is an important
6 dimension of sociolinguistic understanding, it represents far too broad an area to include
7 in the present discussion. I will instead be using perception here to refer to the processes
8 engaged when people are exposed to external stimuli, in this case linguistic material, and
9 extract information from it. As a result, I will be focusing on three dimensions of
10 research: the social evaluation of speech, the extraction of social information from speech
11 and the contributions of social information to linguistic comprehension.
12
13
2. Social evaluation
14
15 The most prolific area dealing with social perceptions of language is language attitudes,
16 which examines emotions and beliefs about language varieties and language behaviors.
17 The study of attitudes has used a range of methods, including the analysis of existing texts
18 (e.g. government policy statements or newspaper articles) and survey and interview tech-
19 niques designed to ask speakers directly about their feelings and beliefs regarding the vari-
20 eties in their area.
21 Language attitudes is a field that straddles the divide between the theoretical and the
22 applied. While advancing our general understanding of the social evaluation of language
23 is important to strengthening our models of social and linguistic behavior, it also has
24 direct implications for the lived reality of speakers around the world. Much work in
25 language attitudes seeks to document the stigma brought to bear on linguistic minorities
26 (Giles & Billings 2004). Such work has the potential to inform language policy, guide
27 activists in developing revitalization campaigns and assist educators in cultivating respect
28 for linguistic variation. All of these projects can be improved by a clearer understanding
29 not only of the attitudes speakers hold toward the varieties around them but by how
30 those attitudes fit into the larger picture of ideologies and practices of the communities in
31 question.
32 A common concern in attitudes research, however, is the distortion that may occur as
33 a result of conscious manipulation on the part of respondents, for example in order to
34 adhere to social constraints against articulating negative judgments. To elicit responses that
35 participants are unwilling or unable to describe consciously, verbal guise (Cooper 1975)
36 and matched guise techniques (Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner & Fillenbaum 1960) have
37 been developed. These methods present listeners with recorded speech from different
38 speakers (verbal guise) or from the same speakers using different language varieties and
39 presented to listeners as if they were distinct speakers (matched guise). Listeners are then
40 asked to evaluate the speakers on a variety of dimensions, often class or status, personal
41 attractiveness or integrity and dynamism (Zahn & Hopper 1985). While listeners are still
42 consciously evaluating the stimuli, they are evaluating specific individuals, relieving them
43 of the social task of conveying an attitude toward an entire group. The differing evalua-
44 tions of the guises are then taken to reflect participants’ attitudes toward the varieties
45 employed and the group associated with them. This connection is assumed to be particu-
46 larly strong in matched guise work, where the use of the same speakers across guises
47 ensures some level of consistency of paralinguistic cues (but see Lee 1971).
48 These social evaluation methods have been used extensively through the years since its
49 inception and has been critiqued (Agheyisi & Fishman 1970; Lee 1971) and summarized
ª 2010 The Author Language and Linguistics Compass 3/1 (2010): 1–13, 10.1111/j..2010.00201.x
Sociolinguistics and Perception 3 1
1 repeatedly (Agheyisi & Fishman 1970; Giles 1977; Giles, Hewstone & Ball 1983; Ryan,
2 Hewstone & Giles 1984; Giles, Hewstone, Ryan & Johnson 1987; Cargile & Giles 1997;
3 Edwards 1999; Milroy & Preston 1999; Giles & Billings 2004). Work in this area has
4 demonstrated that stigmas attached to linguistic varieties have strong impacts on the social
5 evaluations of their speakers. Speakers of stigmatized varieties are judged as less intelligent,
6 less wealthy, less powerful and even shorter and less good-looking, based solely on their
7 voices. Speakers of some varieties receive other social benefits in exchange, in the form
8 of higher integrity or social attractiveness scores either from in-group members (Lambert
9 et al. 1960; Kalmar, Yong & Hong 1987) or more widely (Gallois, Callan & Johnstone
10 1984). In other cases, mutual negative feeling leads to the downgrading of outgroup
11 members on all dimensions (Lambert et al. 1960; Abrams & Hogg 1987). Unsurprisingly,
12 different populations of listeners display different patterns, such that, for example, a Welsh
13 audience attending a Welsh-language play shows stronger response to a request for assis-
14 tance made in Welsh or Welsh-accented English, contrasting with a different audience in
15 the same theater,attending an English-language movie (Bourhis & Giles 1976).
16 The original impetus behind the matched guise technique, presented by Lambert et al.
17 (1960), was to elicit reactions to voices as representatives of linguistically defined groups,
18 to uncover attitudes toward the groups. The technique has also been employed to ask
19 more specific questions about the process of forming an impression of another person on
20 the basis of speech, examining how particular elements combine to form a whole. This
21 work has demonstrated, for example, that evaluations of a speaker’s competence correlates
22 directly with their speech rate, while social evaluation of speech rate follows a curve
23 favoring mid-range speeds and disfavoring fast and slow talkers (Street & Brady 1982).
24 Street, Brady & Putman (1983) have further shown that this curved effect may be attrib-
25 utable to individual listeners socially favoring speakers with speech rates perceived to be
26 close to the listeners’ own.
27 Other work on paralinguistic cues has confirmed listener preferences for speakers who
28 are similar to them, for example in the domains of response latency (Boltz 2005). This
29 preference and the apparent tendency of speakers to cater to it form the basis of Accom-
30 modation Theory (Giles & Powesland 1975; Thakerar, Giles & Cheshire 1982), which
31 proposes that interactants who feel positively toward one another tend to align their
32 speech patterns with one another on a variety of dimensions. Further, speaker/hearers are
33 aware of this tendency and will evaluate a speaker not only based on their general speech,
34 but accommodation or lack thereof (Willemyns, Gallois, Callan & Pittam 1997). Conver-
35 gence is not the only tool available to speakers to manage social distance, however. Situa-
36 tions of social tension or conflict may not only fail to generate alignment, but actually
37 prompt divergence (Doise, Sinclair & Bourhis 1976; Bourhis, Giles, Leyens & Tajfel
38 1979).
39 Despite clear evidence for the conscious use and evaluation of accommodation in some
40 circumstances, accommodation also appears to function on an automatic level. Some
41 degree of accommodation is observable even in response to recorded stimuli (Pardo
42 2006), in situations where no social benefit will accrue from similarity. Despite the lack
43 of social depth to the setting, social orientation of the participant to their ‘interlocutor’
44 still appear to influence the degree of accommodation (Babel 2008). The role of social
45 information in automatic accommodation thus remains unknown, but the well-established
46 phenomena of automatic processes in social cognition (see Bargh & Chartrand 1999;
47 Hassin, Uleman & Bargh 2005) suggest that more work is needed in this area.
48 As accommodation studies indicate, the social impact of a linguistic variety or a linguis-
49 tic form depends not only on the perceiver’s previous knowledge or experience, but on
1 the context in which the form occurs. Stigmatized varieties or accents seen as problematic
2 in a formal setting such as a school or a job interview may be more positively viewed in
3 a social setting like of home (Creber & Giles 1983; Callan, Gallois & Forbes 1983; Gallois
4 et al. 1984; White,Vandiver, Becker, Overstreet, Temple, Hagan & Mandelbaum 1998).
5 Similarly, the content of an utterance may affect the social evaluation of the accent in
6 which it is delivered, for example when a foreign-accented speaker does or does not issue
7 a challenge to national identity (Cargile & Giles 1998). Contextual factors may also
8 ‘explain away’ sociolinguistic judgments, rescuing a speaker from the negative implica-
9 tions of a slow speech rate if they are described as experts talking to a novice audience
10 (Brown, Giles & Thakerar 1985).
11 While not as prolific as language attitudes, evaluation work within a variationist frame-
12 work has contributed important insights regarding the relationship between linguistic
13 behaviors and social beliefs. Labov (1966) introduced the subjective evaluation test, a
14 variant of the verbal guise in which talkers were asked to read a passage that successively
15 exposed specific vowel classes to listeners. Thus, although each performance contained a
16 range of possibly relevant variables, the influence of each of those of interest could be
17 examined with minimal interference from the others, allowing a close analysis of the
18 social evaluations of each individual element of the larger New York sociolinguistic
19 picture.
20 Lexical or syntactic variables have also drawn some interest in perception work, as they
21 offer the methodologically simpler option of text-based guises. This techique has been
22 used to elicit social perceptions of quotatives (Buchstaller 2004) and styles such as power-
23 ful vs. powerless language (e.g. Parton, Siltanen, Hosman & Langenderfer 2002). In
24 recent years, advances in technology have widened the possibilities for directly manipulat-
25 ing the acoustic properties of recorded speech. This has lead to work contrasting reactions
26 to stimuli featuring spliced linguistic cues (Labov, Ash, Baranowski, Nagy, Ravindranath
27 & Weldon 2006; Campbell-Kibler 2009) as well as resynthesized speech (Fridland,
28 Bartlett & Kreuz 2004; Plichta & Preston 2005).
29 This work on specific linguistic variables has highlighted the role of interactions
30 between a given linguistic cue and other linguistic and nonlinguistic elements in a speech
31 act, a finding which is both of interest in its own right and an important methodological
32 point regarding the use of social evaluation techniques. Many studies seek to control the
33 influence of conversational context by asking listeners to evaluate speech clips without
34 any context provided. This runs the danger, however, that listeners will respond based on
35 the contexts they imagine (consciously or otherwise) for the clips. These contexts may be
36 different across listeners, leading to more variation in the responses or, worse, across
37 speakers or guises, leading to confounds in the results. A better approach is to either
38 provide a scenario for context or of collect information from listeners that will illuminate
39 the contextual factors listeners are providing for themselves.
40 One of the key cues listeners use to establish context is the content of the message, a
41 factor that also influence social evaluations quite heavily. The most common approach to
42 this problem is to have speakers read prepared texts so as to keep the read material
43 constant. This technique can endanger the ecological validity of the study, however,
44 making the task more divorced from recongizable real-world social tasks, as listeners can
45 easily detect the difference between read and spontaneous speech (Blaauw 1994; Laan
46 1997). There are two ways to address this concern. First, use stimuli based on recordings
47 of spontaneous speech. Some control can be obtained by soliciting similar topics from
48 speakers either in a general way (i.e. describe your favorite hobby, or class, etc) or
49 selecting a less rich domain, for example asking for directions to the same location.
1 Alternatively, samples can be selected for diversity in message content to ensure that the
2 findings apply across different texts (Campbell-Kibler 2009). If using exactly the same text
3 is crucially important for study design (e.g. if the role of phonetic context for a given var-
4 iable is important), the task may be constructed in such a way as to render the use of read
5 speech more plausible. Labov et al. (2006) employed this technique by crafting a text
6 resembling a television news announcement and presenting the speaker as auditioning for
7 a job as a news anchor.
8
9
3. Social identification
10
11 One flaw in much language attitudes research, noted by Preston (1989), is that it is not
12 always clear exactly what social image is triggering the social evaluations obtained. This is
13 particularly apparent in work such as Ladegaard (1998), in which Danish participants with
14 little exposure to English speakers were largely unable to identify varieties of English
15 (with the exception of RP and standard American), but nonetheless reported social evalu-
16 ations strongly resembling those of native speakers (e.g. producing stereotypic descriptions
17 of the Australian speaker). Social evaluation provides one piece of the puzzle but does
18 not address what social information listeners can extract from the speech of particular
19 speakers, and which linguistic cues they rely on to do so.
20 In the United States, the identification of race has been a key topic of investigation,
21 made all the more relevant by the ways in which such identifications may trigger discrim-
22 inatory behavior, for example, in housing (Baugh 1996) and employment (Hopper &
23 Williams 1973). This work has focused almost exclusively on the identification of African
24 American speakers, primarily by White listeners. Purnell, Idsardi & Baugh (1999) have
25 shown that such identifications can be made with minimal amounts of information, even
26 on the basis of the single word ‘hello’. Of course, such identifications are made not on
27 the basis of the category of African American itself, but on the linguistic cues associated
28 with a particular variety of African American speech. African American speakers of other
29 varieties, for example vernaculars more commonly associated with White speakers, are
30 not consistently identified as African American (Thomas & Reaser 2004).
31 Similar questions arise regarding regional variation, for example whether some regional
32 accents are easier to identify than others or what factors increase a listener’s ability to
33 correctly identify regional varieties. Cynthia Clopper and colleagues have presented a
34 series of results illuminating the ways in which listeners perceive regional dialect variation
35 among White speakers in the United States. This research has shown that listeners’ level
36 of experience with different varieties (having lived in multiple places) is predictive of
37 their skill in identifying where a talker is from (Clopper & Pisoni 2004). They have also
38 revealed intriguing patterns in the perceptual similarity matrices of free classification
39 responses (Clopper & Pisoni 2007).
40 Understanding what facilitates social identification more generally does not, of course,
41 tell us which specific cues listeners most often use in such identitifications nor what they
42 are capable of when given little to work with. To investigate particular cues, we can
43 manipulate speech from regionally distinct talkers, systemically obscuring different aspects
44 of the speech stream. For example, a low pass filter will leave prosody intact while
45 removing segmental characteristics (Foreman 2000; Szakay 2008), while randomly resplic-
46 ing the stream in a new order will leave segmental information intact but disrupt some
47 prosodic information and destroy lexical and semantic content (Bezooijen & Boves 1986).
48 Such techniques may of course also be used in social evaluation studies as described in
49 the previous section (e.g. Bezooijen 1988).
1 The perception of sexual orientation, particularly in male speakers, has been another
2 strong area of research. This literature has had mixed results with the search for acoustic
3 features which reliably distinguish between the speech of self-identified gay and straight
4 men. Instead, research has documented the phenomenon of the ‘gay accent’ as perceptual
5 in nature, a set of accents that prompt identifications of gayness or effeminacy but are tied
6 to more complex stylistic choices than actual sexual orientation. Potential acoustic
7 patterns suggested as linked to the percept of gay male speech and/or feminine male speech
8 include vowel formant structures (Munson & Zimmerman 2006), pitch (Smyth, Jacobs &
9 Rogers 2003) and the length and quality of /s/ tokens (Linville 1998; Levon 2007). While
10 an interesting area for study, effective study the relationships between linguistic forms
11 and sexuality (whether actual or perceived) can only occur with careful attention to how
12 categories of sexaulity are constructed for the population under study and how they are
13 tied to other social qualities (for a discussion and critique, see Kulick 2000)
14 In addition to carrying information about personal attributes like race or region of
15 origin, speech can carry information about situationally defined characteristics, such as
16 social stances or emotions (Bezooijen, Otto & Heenan 1983; de Gelder, Pourtois &
17 Weiskrantz 2002; Nygaard & Queen 2008). Work on the perception of emotions has also
18 looked at the intriguing question of how information from the audio and visual channels
19 are integrated (see Campanella & Belin 2007). For example, for listeners evaluating faces
20 for happiness or sadness, the addition of a happy or sad voice strongly shifts perceptions
21 in the direction of the voice, an effect that holds even when listeners are instructed to
22 ignore the voice (de Gelder & Vroomen 2000). A similar effect seems to hold in listeners
23 with brain damage such that they are incapable of consciously perceiving visual stimuli
24 (de Gelder et al. 2002).
25 The most basic form of social information a listener might seek about a speaker is, of
26 course, whether or not they are a known individual. The process of identifying specific
27 individuals shows its own complexities, for example that listeners exposed to speakers in
28 one modality (e.g. video of speech) can recognize them in another (audio speech stream)
29 (Lachs & Pisoni 2004). Patterns of similarity across talkers are likewise preserved across
30 even such radical manipulations as sine wave speech (Remez, Fellowes & Nagel 2007).
31 Such questions of identification have been primarily pursued by phoneticians, but are of
32 interest to sociolinguists for two reasons. First, they reveal important information about
33 the social process of forming and referencing a social entity in the mind, and secondly,
34 they play a role in the tremendously interesting topic of the next section, the influence
35 of social information on speech perception.
36
37
4. Speech perception
38
39 The relationship between linguistic and social processes is by no means a one-way street.
40 Just as listeners use language cues to better understand the social backgrounds of their
41 interlocutors, they also use the social information available to them to better understand
42 the linguistic material around them. This phenomenon has been most throughly studied
43 with respect to phonetic processing, although doubtless it extends to a range of types of
44 linguistic processing.
45 One of the central problems in the study of phonetics is understanding how listeners
46 can consistently recognize as the same phoneme tokens that are acoustically so different.
47 While this problem has many dimensions, an important factor is the multitude of differ-
48 ences between individual speakers. As a result, ways in which listeners adapt to particular
49 speakers has long been a core question in phonetics. While early theories proposed that
1 perceptual processes normalized the speech signal in order to extract the phonemic infor-
2 mation and discard ‘irrelevant’ variation (Joos 1948), extensive research over the past
3 decades has documented the astonishing degree to which listeners retain and use informa-
4 tion about variability in the perception task. To be sure, much disagreement remains
5 regarding exactly how such information is retained and how perceptual processes make
6 use of it (see Magnuson & Nusbaum 2007). The literature on talker variability is too
7 large to address here (see Johnson & Mullennix 1997), but its investigation has revealed
8 that listeners attend not only to idiosyncratic differences between talkers, but to structured
9 differences that are tied to socially defined groups of speakers. This awareness has grown
10 at the same time as technological advances have greatly facilitated the widespread use of
11 acoustic methods in sociolinguistic work, leading to new and strong connections between
12 the fields, and the emergence of a new subfield known as sociophonetics (Hay & Drager
13 2007).
14 The most basic way that sociolinguistic variation can impact speech perception is of
15 course that variation leads to particular patterned instances of difference which perceivers
16 must then contend with, regardless of whether they are aware of the phenomenon. So,
17 for example, the differences in linguistic experience between natives of Long Island (hear-
18 ing their local variety but also more generally available standard varieties) and those from
19 elsewhere lead to differential learning of tokens of words containing a postvocalic ‘r’. In
20 both repetition ( speaker priming speaker) and semantic (baker priming bread) priming tasks,
21 Long Islanders are primed linguistically by rhotic and nonrhotic tokens, while outsiders
22 show priming effects only from the rhotic tokens belonging to their more practiced vari-
23 ety (Sumner & Samuel 2009).
24 The impact of language variation and change in linguistic processing may be most
25 prominent in the case of phonemic mergers. As language changes, sets of sounds that
26 were once distinct categories (such as the initial sounds in witch and which) merge into a
27 single category, leading to speakers pronouncing them in similar ways and being unable
28 to tell them apart. It appears that speakers lose the ability to tell the two sounds apart
29 even while they are (apparently unconsciously) maintaining a distinction between them
30 (Labov, Karen & Miller 1991). More intriguingly, in making distinctions between sounds
31 undergoing merger, listeners take into account not only the sounds they hear, but what
32 they know about the speakers. In New Zealand, the word classes represented by near and
33 square are undergoing a merger that is still quite recent. As a result, younger speakers are
34 more likely to have pronunciations of these two sounds that are very similar, while older
35 speakers are more likely to pronounce them differently. Hay, Warren & Drager (2006)
36 have shown that listeners who distinguished that word in their own speech were more
37 successful at distinguishing the two when a picture accompanying the speech was of an
38 older speaker (unsurprisingly, those who did not distinguish the two in their own speech
39 had more trouble overall and lacked this strategy). Working along similar lines, Koops,
40 Gentry & Pantos (2008) have shown that participants from Houston, Texas, where the
41 pin/pen merger is disappearing, have more trouble disambiguating between the two
42 vowels when shown a picture of an older speaker.
43 Mergers are not the only area in which social information has been shown to influence
44 speech perception. Niedzielski (1999), one of the pioneers in this area, showed that
45 listener responses to a vowel identification task were influenced by their linguistic beliefs
46 about different speakers and their speech habits. Listeners from Michigan listened to
47 speech from a fellow Michigander, including examples of vowels showing her to be a
48 participant in Canadian raising, a pattern that these listeners associated exclusively with
49 Canadians (often stereotyped as ‘oot and aboot’). They were then asked to select the
1 synthetic vowel that best matched the speaker’s production, choosing from a set. When
2 the speaker was described as Canadian, listeners tended to select the correct, raised vowel
3 but when she was described as from Michigan, they selected instead a lower, more
4 standard vowel.
5 This research has been replicated in the New Zealand context by Jen Hay and
6 colleagues, using Australian accents as the ‘other’ foil. Hay’s research, however, has intro-
7 duced two interesting twists. The first is that in New Zealand, the pattern appears to be
8 gender-split, with females moving toward and males moving away from the Australian
9 norm (Warren, Hay & Thomas 2007; Hay & Drager 2009). Even more striking,
10 however, is their finding that the effect obtains without the listeners believing that the
11 speaker is actually Australian (Warren et al. 2007). Indeed, merely exposing the listener
12 to a stuffed animal iconic of the relevant country (koala or kangaroo on the one hand,
13 kiwi bird on the other) is sufficient to produce the result (Hay & Drager, forthcoming).
14 This body of literature has opened truly new questions about the relationship between
15 social and linguistic categories in mental representations. Given the unfortunately complex
16 methodology, it is difficult to determine exactly the level of linguistic processing being
17 influenced, and researchers are seeking out more direct methods.
18 Strand (1999) reports on a similar set of studies that show that listeners’ beliefs about the
19 gender of a talker influence their perception of his or her phonemic boundaries. Intrigu-
20 ingly, these beliefs include not only whether the talker is male or female, but how typically
21 (for the particular cultural context) male or female the talker sounds. Her research draws
22 on the pattern in speech production that men’s tokens of /s/ and /ò/, being commonly
23 lower in frequency, has a lowerfrequency boundary between the two phonemes. Strand
24 found that when hearing a male voice, listeners show awareness of this pattern by placing
25 the boundary lower than when hearing a female voice. The typicality of the voice exacer-
26 bates this behavior, however, with the typical male and female voices forming the enve-
27 lope and the atypical voices falling between them. While it is well established that
28 individual patterns of speech can set phonetic boundaries similarly, this work shows that
29 cultural stereotypes of gender typicality can influence these categories boundaries.
30 In addition to phonetic identification, lexical access has been shown to be suspectible
31 to the influence of sociolinguistic knowledge. Staum Casasanto (2008) shows that pictures
32 of Black vs. White faces significantly impact whether listeners perceive a string like [mæ
33 s] as a complete lexical item (mass) or as a reduced form which has undergone consonant
34 cluster reduction (mast). Listeners, associating White speakers with less consonant cluster
35 reduction and African American speakers with greater use of reduction, took longer to
36 process a sentence ending which violated these sociallytriggered expectations.
37 A relatively recent and exciting strain of research has begun asking about the neural
38 correlates of sociolinguistic tasks. Early in the literature on Event Related Potentials and
39 linguistic processing, Osterhout, Bersick & McLaughlin (1997) showed that violations of
40 gendered stereotypes (e.g. that doctors are male and nurses are female) elicited similar
41 ERP responses as semantic gender-related violations (e.g. that bachelors are male and spin-
42 sters are female). More recently, Van Berkum, van den Brink, Tesink, Kos & Hagoort
43 (2008) have used ERPs to demonstrate that listeners respond to anomalies between
44 speaker and message as rapidly as 200–300 ms after the anomaly occurs. Following up on
45 this work, Tesink, Petersson, Van Berkum, van den Brink, Buitelaar & Hagoort (2008)
46 used fMRI scans to identify two regions of the brain which responded to speaker-based
47 incongruities (i.e. a child talking about drinking wine) as well as semantic and world-based
48 anomalies. Most recently, Loudermilk, Gutierrez & Corina (2009) have reported an ERP
49 response linked to contextually anomalous instances of a sociolinguistic variable.
1 5. Conclusions
2
Sociolinguists and other scholars of language and social phenomena have long examined
3
the social evaluation of language. Current research on sociolinguistic perception builds on
4
these traditions but also reaches out more explicitly to the fields of psycholinguistics and
5
phonetics, to better understand how linguistic and social cognitive processes are (and are
6
not) integrated. While this question is of interest for both perception and production, the
7
experimental work necessary to address these questions has to date been more accessible
8
for perceptual processes.
9
Other theoretical developments have increased the need for perceptual work from a
10
variationist perspective. Research in what Eckert (2005) refers to as the ‘third wave’ of
11
variation has put understanding indexical meaning (Silverstein 1976; Ochs 1992) at the
12
heart of its research enterprise. This approach does not see linguistic behaviors as
13
merely reflective of social categories, but considers them to be one of the tools that
14
speaker/hearers use to build the social structures they inhabit. Through the repeated
15
indexing of social information, speakers create connections between linguistic cues and
16
social ideas (e.g. released /t/ and education). Central to this view of variation is the
17
idea that such social connections exist not only as abstract patterns of use, but as mental
18
connections in the minds of both speakers and heares (note, however, that this does
19
not require a given speaker and a given hearer to agree on the connection in
20
question!).
21
Such a theory necessarily makes predictions regarding the perception of indexically
22
loaded linguistic forms, and some third wave work has attempted to test these predictions.
23
Campbell-Kibler (2009) argues that social perceptions of the (ING) variable in the spon-
24
taneous speech of multiple speakers confirm the key meanings (education, intelligence)
25
indicated by other studies based on correlations in production (Labov 1966; Trudgill
26
1974) and on speaker metacommentary (Wald & Shopen 1985). Nonetheless, even such
27
key meanings are found only in restricted areas of the data, overcome in other instances
28
by factors such as regional accent or perceived class. This malleability as a result of other
29
features is predictable from work in impression formation which has documented the
30
degree to which individuals are perceived as gestalt wholes, with more central attributes
31
strongly influencing the social contribution of less central attributes (Asch 1946; Kelley
32
1950). Nonetheless, this complexity problematizes the common theoretical shorthand of
33
‘the meaning’ of a given variable, supporting instead Eckert’s (2008) proposal that linguis-
34
tic variables are tied to indexical fields of ideologically related meanings. Drawing on this
35
tradition, new work combines perceptual experiments with a study of production varia-
36
tion and ethnography to examine the ability of speakers to distinguish phonetic patterns
37
that they display consistently. Drager (2009) examines the degree to which listeners can
38
access phonetic detail at work in their own local community of practice, while Podesva,
39
Jamsu, Callier & Heitman (2009) investigate the impact of released /t/ manipulation on
40
the perceptions of already well-known politicians.
41
The perception of linguistic input is one of the fundamental processes of language
42
behavior, and the current state of the field points to a range of fascinating open questions.
43
More clearly understanding the links between linguistic forms social and indexical
44
meaning is at the forefront of much variation work at the moment, and mental represen-
45
tations accessed in perception form one key piece of that puzzle. The connections
46
between phonetic processing and social processing is another key issue to be pursued.
47
And lastly, the connection between sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic insights on the on
48
hand, and those gleaned from social psychology represent another, relatively understudied
49
1 field. The existing knowledge and the open questions suggest that perceptual methods
2 and questions will remain an increasingly central aspect of sociolinguistic work.
3
4
Notes
5
6 * Correspondence address: Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University, 222
Oxley Hall, 1712, Neil Avenue Columbus, OH 43210-1298, USA. E-mail: kbck@ling.osu.edu
7
8
9 Works Cited
10 Abrams, Dominic, and Michael A. Hogg. 1987. Language attitudes, frames of reference, and social identity: a
11 Scottish dimension. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 6. 201–13.
12 Agheyisi, Rebecca, and Joshua A. Fishman. 1970. Language attitudes studies: a brief survey of methodological
13 approaches. Anthropological Linguistics 12(5). 137–57.
Asch, Solomon E. 1946. Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41.
14 258–90.
15 Babel, Molly. 2008. The influence of talker race on phonetic accommodation. Paper presented at the 37th Annual
16 Meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation, Houston, TX.
17 Bargh, John A., and Tanya L. Chartrand. 1999. The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist
54(7). 462–79.
18 Baugh, John. 1996. Perceptions within a variable paradigm: Black and White racial detection and identification
19 based on speech. Focus on the USA, ed. by E. W. Schneider, 169–82. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
20 Bezooijen, Renée Van. 1988. The relative importance of pronunciation, prosody, and voice quality for the attribu-
21 tion of social status and personality characteristics. Language attitudes in the Dutch language area number 5 in
topics in sociolinguistics, ed. by R. V. Hout and U. Knops, 85–103. Dordrecht: Foris.
22 ——, and L. Boves. 1986. The effects of low-pass filtering and random splicing on the perception of speech. Jour-
23 nal of Psycholinguistic Research 15(5). 403–17.
24 ——, Stanley A. Otto, and Thomas A. Heenan. 1983. Recognition of vocal expressions of emotion. Journal of
25 Cross-Cultural Psychology 14(4). 387–406.
Blaauw, Eleonora. 1994. The contribution of prosodic boundary markers to the perceptual difference between read
26 and spontaneous speech. Speech Communication 14. 359–75.
27 Boltz, Marilyn G. 2005. Temporal dimensions of conversational interaction: the role of response latencies and
28 pauses in social impression formation. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 24(2). 103–38.
Bourhis, Richard Y. Howard Giles. 1976. The language of cooperation in Wales: a field study. Language Sciences
29 42. 13–6.
30 ——, Jaques P. Leyens, and Henri Tajfel. 1979. Psycholinguistic distinctiveness: language divergence in Belgium.
31 Language and social psychology, ed. by H. Giles and R. N. St. Clair, ???–???. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 3
32 Brown, Bruce L., Howard Giles, and Jitendra N. Thakerar. 1985. Speaker evaluations as a function of speech rate,
accent and context. Language and Communication 5. 207–20.
33 Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2004. Putting perception to the reality test: the case of go and like. University of Philadelphia
34 Working Papers in Linguistics 10.2: Selected Papers from NWAVE 32.
35 Callan, Victor J., Cynthia Gallois, and Paula A. Forbes. 1983. Evaluative reactions to accented English: ethnicity,
36 sex role, and context. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 14(4). 407–26.
Campanella, Salvatore, and Pascal Belin. 2007. Integrating face and voice in person perception. TRENDS in
37 Cognitive Sciences 11(12). ???–???. 4
38 Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn, 2009. The nature of sociolinguistic perception. Language Variation and Change 21(1).
39 135–56.
40 Cargile, Aaron Castelan, and Howard Giles. 1997. Understanding language attitudes: exploring listener affect and
identity. Language and Communication 17(3). 195–217.
41 ——, and ——. 1998. Language attitudes toward varieties of English: An American-Japanese context. Journal of
42 Applied Communication Research 26. 338–56.
43 Clopper, Cynthia G., and David B. Pisoni. 2004. Homebodies and army brats: some effects of early linguistic
44 experience and residential history on dialect categorization. Language Variation and Change 16. 31–48.
——, and ——. 2007. Free classification of regional dialects of American English. Journal of Phonetics 35. 421–38.
45 Cooper, R. L. 1975. Introduction to language attitudes II. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 6. 5–9.
46 Creber, Clare, and Howard Giles. 1983. Social context and language attitudes: the role of formality-informality of
47 the setting. Language Sciences 5(2). 155–83.
48
49
1 de Gelder, Beatrice, Gilles Pourtois, and Lawrence Weiskrantz. 2002. Fear recognition in the voice is modulated by
2 unconsciously recognized facial expressions but not by unconsciously recognized affective pictures. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 99(6). 4121–6.
3 de Gelder, Beatrice, and Jean Vroomen. 2000. The perception of emotions by ear and by eye. Cognition and
4 Emotion 14(3). 289–311.
5 Doise, Willem, Anne Sinclair, and Richard Y. Bourhis. 1976. Evaluation of accent convergence and divergence in
cooperative and competitive intergroup situations. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 15. 247–52.
6 Drager, Katie. 2009. A sociophonetic ethnography of Selwyn Girls’ High. PhD thesis. ??????: University of Canter-
7 bury. 5
8 Eckert, Penelope. 2005. Variation, convention, and social meaning. Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the
9 Linguistic Society of America. Oakland CA. 7th Jan. 2005.
——. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4). 453–76.
10 Edwards, John R. 1999. Refining our understanding of language attitudes. Journal of Language and Social Psychol-
11 ogy 18(1). 101–10.
12 Foreman, Christina Gayle. 2000. Identification of African-American English from prosodic cues. Texas Linguistic
13 Forum 43. 57–66.
Fridland, Valerie, Kathryn Bartlett, and Roger Kreuz. 2004. Do you hear what I hear? Experimental measurement
14 of the perceptual salience of acoustically manipulated vowel variants by Southern speakers in Memphis, TN.
15 Language Variation and Change 16. 1–16.
16 Gallois, Cynthia, Victor J. Callan, and Michael Johnstone. 1984. Personality judgments of Australian Aborigine and
17 White speakers: ethnicity, sex and context. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 3. 39–57.
Giles, Howard 1977. Social psychology and applied linguistics: towards an integrative approach. I. T. L. Review of
18 Applied Linguistics 35. 27–42.
19 ——, and Andrew C. Billings. 2004. Assessing language attitudes: speaker evaluation studies. The handbook of
20 applied linguistics, Chapter 7, ed. by A. Davies and C. Elder, 187–209. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
21 ——, Miles Hewstone, and Peter Ball. 1983. Language attitudes in multilingual settings: prologue with priorities.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 4(2/3). 81–100.
22 ——, Miles Hewstone, Ellen Bouchard Ryan, and Patricia Johnson. 1987. Research on language attitudes. Socio-
23 linguistics: an interdisciplinary handbook of the science of language, Volume 1, Chapter 70, N. D. Ulrich
24 Ammon and K. J. Mattheierr, 585–97. Berlin: De Gruyter.
——, and Peter Powesland. 1975. Speech style and social evaluation. San Francisco: Academic Press.
25 Hassin, Ran R., James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh (Eds). 2005. The new unconscious. ???????: Oxford Univer-
26 sity Press. 6
27 Hay, Jennifer, and Katie Drager. 2007. Sociophonetics. Annual Review of Anthropology 36. 89–103.
28 ——. 2009. Stuffed toys and speech perception. Linguistics ???. ???–???. 7
Hay, Jennifer, Paul Warren, and Katie Drager. 2006. Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a mer-
29 ger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 34. 458–84.
30 Hopper, Robert, and Frederick Williams. 1973. Speech characteristics and employability. Speech Monographs 40.
31 296–302.
32 Johnson, Keith, and John W. Mullennix ( eds). 1997. Talker variability in speech processing. ???????: Academic
Press. 8
33 Joos, Martin. 1948. Acoustic phonetics. Language 24(supplement 2). 1–136.
34 Kalmar, Ivan, Zhong Yong, and Xiao Hong. 1987. Language attitudes in Guangzhou, China. Language in Society
35 16. 499–508.
36 Kelley, Harold H. 1950. The warm-cold variable in first impressions of people. Journal of Personality 18. 431–9.
Koops, Christian, Elizabeth Gentry, and Andrew Pantos. 2008. The effect of perceived speaker age on the percep-
37 tion of PIN and PEN vowels in Houston, Texas. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics
38 14(2). ???–???. 9
39 Kulick, Don. 2000. Gay and lesbian language. Annual Review of Anthropology ???. 243–85. 10
40 Laan, Gitta P. M. 1997. The contribution of intonation, segmental durations, and spectral features to the perception
of a spontaneous and a read speaking style. Speech Communication 22. 43–65.
41 Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied
42 Linguistics.
43 ——. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
——, Sharon Ash, Maciej Baranowski, Naomi Nagy, MayaRavindranath, and Tracy Weldon. 2006. Listeners’
44 sensitivity to the frequency of sociolinguistic variables. Penn working papers in linguistics: selected papers from
45 NWAV 34 in New York City, Volume 12.2, ed. by Michael L. Friesner and Maya Ravindranath, 105–29.
46 Philadelphia, PA: ??????. 11
47 ——, Mark Karen, and Corey Miller. 1991. Near-mergers and the suspension of phonemic contrast. Language
Variation and Change 3. 33–74.
48
49
1 Lachs, Lorin, and David B. Pisoni. 2004. Crossmodal source identification in speech perception. Ecological
2 Psychology 16(3). 159–87.
Ladegaard, Hans J. 1998. National stereotypes and language attitudes: the perception of British, American and
3 Australian language and culture in Denmark. Language and Communication 18. 251–74.
4 Lambert, Wallace E., R. C. Hodgson, R. C. Gardner, and S. Fillenbaum. 1960. Evaluational reactions to spoken
5 languages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 60(1). ???–???. 12
Lee, Richard R. 1971. Dialect perception: a critical review and reevaluation. Quarterly Journal of Speech 57.
6 410–7.
7 Levon, Erez. 2007. Sexuality in context: variation and the sociolinguistic perception of identity. Language in Soci-
8 ety 36(4). 533–54.
9 Linville, Sue Ellen. 1998. Acoustic correlates of perceived versus actual sexual orientation in men’s speech. Folia
Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 50(1). 35–48.
10 Loudermilk, Brandon, Eva Gutierrez, and David Corina. 2009. Cognitive capacities of the sociolinguistic monitor:
11 evidence from event-related potentials. Paper Presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 38. ???–???. 13
12 Magnuson, James S., and Howard C. Nusbaum. 2007. Acoustic differences, listener expectations, and the perceptual
13 accommodation of talker variability. Journal of Experimental Psychology 33(2). 391–409.
Milroy, Lesley, and Dennis R. Preston. 1999. Introduction to special issue on language attitudes. Journal of Lan-
14 guage and Social Psychology 18(1). 4–9.
15 Munson, Benjamin, and Lindsey J. Zimmerman. 2006. Perception of sexual orientation, masculinity, and femininity
16 in formant-resynthesized speech. Paper Presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 35, Columbus Ohio.
17 Niedzielski, Nancy A. 1999. The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables. Journal
of Language and Social Psychology 18(1). 62–85.
18 Nygaard, Lynne C., and Jennifer S. Queen 2008. Communicating emotion: linking affective prosody and word
19 meaning. Journal of Experimental Psychology 34(4). 1017–30.
20 Ochs, Elinor. 1992. Indexing gender. Rethinking context: language as an interactive phenomenon. ed. by A. Dur-
21 anti and C. Goodwin, 335–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Osterhout, Lee, Michael Bersick, and Judith McLaughlin. 1997. Brain potentials reflect violations of gender stereo-
22 types. Memory and Cognition 25. 273–85.
23 Pardo, Jennifer S. 2006. On phonetic convergence during conversational interaction. Journal of the Acoustical Soci-
24 ety of America 119(4). 2382–93.
Parton, Sabrena R., Susan A. Siltanen, Lawrence A. Hosman, and Jeff Langenderfer. 2002. Employment interview
25 outcomes and speech style effects. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21. 144–61.
26 Plichta, Bartek, and Dennis R. Preston. 2005. The /ay/s have it: the perception of /ay/ as a North-South stereo-
27 type in US English. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 37. 243–85. Theme Issue on ‘‘Subjective Processes in Language
28 Variation and Change‘‘, ed. by Tore Kristiansen, Nikolas Coupland and Peter Garrett.
Podesva, Robert J., Jermay Jamsu, Patrick Callier, and Jessica Heitman. 2009. Constraints on the social meaning of
29 released /t/: a production and perception study of U.S. politicians. manuscript.
30 Preston, Dennis R. 1989. Perceptual dialectology: Nonlinguists’ views of areal linguistics. Providence, RhodeIsland:
31 Foris Publications.
32 Purnell, Thomas, William Idsardi, and John Baugh. 1999. Perceptual and phonetic experiments on American Eng-
lish dialect identification. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18(1). 10–30.
33 Remez, Robert E., Jennifer M. Fellowes, and Dalia S. Nagel. 2007. On the perception of similarity among talkers.
34 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 122(6). ???–???. 14
35 Ryan, Ellen Bouchard, Miles Hewstone, and Howard Giles. 1984. Language and intergroup attitudes. Attitudinal
36 judgment, Chapter 7, ed. by J. R. Eiser, 135–57. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. Meaning in anthropology, ed. by
37 K. Basso and H. Selby, ???–???. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press. 15
38 Smyth, Ron, Greg Jacobs, and Henry Rogers. 2003. Male voices and perceived sexual orientation: an experimental
39 and theoretical approach. Language in Society 32. 329–50.
40 Staum Casasanto, Laura. 2008. Does social information influence sentence processing? 30th Annual Meeting of the
Cognitive Science Society Washington, D.C.
41 Strand, Elizabeth A. 1999. Uncovering the roles of gender stereotypes in speech perception. Journal of Language
42 and Social Psychology18(1). 86–99. Special Issue: Attitudes, Perception, and Linguistic Features. Lesley Milroy
43 and Dennis R. Preston, Guest eds.
Street, Richard L. Jr., and Robert M. Brady. 1982. Speech rate acceptance ranges and a function of evaluative
44 domain, listener speech rate and comunication context. Communication Monographs 49. 294–308.
45 ——, ——, and William B. Putman. 1983. The influence of speech rate stereotypes and rate similarity on listeners’
46 evaluations of speakers. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 2(1). 37–56.
47 Sumner, Meghan, and Arthur G. Samuel. 2009. The effect of experience on the perception and representation of
dialect variants. Journal of Memory and Language 60. 487–501.
48
49
1 Szakay, Anita. 2008. Social networks and the perceptual relevance of rhythm: a New Zealand case study. University
of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14(2). ???–??? 16
2 Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2006. Analyzing sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3 Tesink, Cathelijne M. J. Y., Karl Magnus Petersson, Jos J A. Van Berkum, Daniëlle van den Brink, Jan K. Bu-
4 itelaar, and Peter Hagoort. 2008. Unification of speaker and meaning in language comprehension: an fMRI
5 study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21(11). 2085–99.
Thakerar, Jitendra N., Howard Giles, and Jenny Cheshire. 1982. Psychological and linguistic parameters of speech
6 accommodation theory. Advances in the social psychology of language, ed. by C. Fraser and K. Scherer, ???–???.
7 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 17
8 Thomas, Erik R. 2002. Sociophonetic applications of speech perception experiments. American Speech 77(2).
9 ???–???. 18
——, and Jeffrey Reaser. 2004. Delimiting perceptual cues used for the ethnic labeling of African American and
10 European American voices. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(1). 54–87.
11 Trudgill, Peter 1974. The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
12 Van Berkum, Jos J. A., Danielle van den Brink, Cathelijne M. J. Y. Tesink, Miriam Kos, and Peter Hagoort. 2008.
13 The neural integration of speaker and message. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20(4). 580–91.
Wald, Benji, and Timothy Shopen. 1985. A researcher’s guide to the sociolinguistic variable (ING). Language:
14 introductory readings, ed. by V. Clark, P. Escholtz and A. Rosa, 515–42. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
15 Warren, Paul, Jen Hay, and Brynmor Thomas. 2007. The loci of sound change effects in recognition and percep-
16 tion. Laboratory phonology 9, ed. by Jennifer Cole and Jose Ignacio Hualde, 87–112. Berlin: Mouton de Gruy-
17 ter.
White, Michael J, Beverly J. Vandiver, Maria L. Becker, Belinda G. Overstreet, Linda E. Temple, Kelly L. Hagan,
18 and Emily P. Mandelbaum. 1998. African-American evaluations of Black English and Standard American English.
19 Journal of Black Psychology 24(1). 60–75.
20 Willemyns, Michael, Cynthia Gallois, Victor J. Callan, and Jeffery Pittam. 1997. Accent accommodation in the job
21 interview: impact of interviewer accent and gender. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16(1). 3–22.
Zahn, Christopher J., and Robert Hopper. 1985. Measuring language attitudes: the speech evaluation instrument.
22 Journal of Language and Social Psychology 4(2). 113–23.
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49

Campbell Kibler 2010

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Campbell Kibler 2010

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Language and Linguistics Compass 3/1 (2010): 1–13, 10.1111/j..2010.00201.

Toc head: Original Article

ª 2010 The Author

You might also like