Recent work shows that ambient exposure in everyday situations can yield implicit knowledge of a language that an observer does not speak. We replicate and extend this work in the context of Spanish in California and Texas. In Word Identification and Wellformedness Rating experiments, non-Spanish-speaking Californians and Texans show implicit lexical and phonotactic knowledge of Spanish, which may be affected by both language structure and attitudes. Their knowledge of Spanish appears to be weaker than New Zealanders’ knowledge of Māori established in recent work, consistent with structural differences between Spanish and Māori. Additionally, the strength of a participant’s knowledge increases with the value they place on Spanish and its speakers in their state. These results showcase the power and generality of statistical learning of language in adults, while also highlighting how it cannot be divorced from the structural and attitudinal factors that shape the context in which it occurs.
The ideology of “the gay lisp” has inspired numerous quantitative studies examining the relationship between /s/ production and sexuality in American English (e.g. Linville 1998; Munson et al. 2006a; Zimman 2013). There are two key gaps in this literature. First, research in this area typically focuses on monosexual (i.e. lesbian, gay, and straight) speakers to the exclusion of bisexuality. Second, work in this area rarely considers the intersection of sexuality with factors outside of gender or sex, and to a lesser extent geographic location (e.g. Campbell-Kibler 2011; Podesva & Hofwegen 2014). This article addresses these disparities by (1) centralizing bisexual speakers and (2) attending to social factors such as race, place, age, and their intersections in the analysis. To that end, we build upon previous work by Willis (forthcoming) and apply a random forest (Breiman 2001) to /s/ center of gravity measurements. In doing so, we follow Tagliamonte and Baayen (2012) in demonstrating the utility of random forests as an approach to quantitative sociolinguistic analysis. Ultimately, the analysis underscores the need to attend to power structures and biases within research practice: the monosexist ideologies of sexuality and gender normativity that obfuscate bisexuality, and the privileging of whiteness that permeates quantitative studies of sexuality and the voice.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.