No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Recent research provides evidence that individuals shift in their perception of variants depending on social characteristics attributed to the speaker.This paper reports on a speech perception experiment designed to test the degree to which the age attributed to a speaker influences the perception of vowels undergoing a chain shift. As a result of the shift, speakers from different generations produce different variants from one another. Results from the experiment indicate that a speaker's perceived age can influence vowel categorization in the expected direction. However, only older participants are influenced by perceived speaker age.This suggests that social characteristics attributed to a speaker affect speech perception differently depending on the salience of the relationship between the variant and the characteristic.The results also provide evidence of an unexpected interaction between the sex of the participant and the sex of the stimulus.The interaction is interpreted as an effect of the participants' previous exposure with male and female speakers.The results are analyzed under an exemplar model of speech production and perception where social information is indexed to acoustic information and the weight of the connection varies depending on the perceived salience of sociophonetic trends.

No abstract

In this paper, I review previous research that investigates sociophonetic variation in speech perception. I also argue that more speech perception work is needed to inform work on variation in speech production, particularly in the areas of language change and stereotype formation. Exploring the mental representations and processing of social and linguistic information as well as treating phonetic and social factors as multidimensional and interacting will take future work in sociophonetics in new and exciting directions.

Investigators have recently made impressive progress in multiple areas of sociophonetics. One area is the use of increasingly sophisticated phonetic analysis, which is demonstrating that very fine phonetic detail is used for the construction of social identity. A second area is the use of ethnographic approaches, which enable researchers to break free from using traditional social categories that may not be relevant for a particular group of speakers, and to investigate in depth the social meaning of particular phonetic variants. A third area is the application of experimental techniques to probe listeners' uses of sociophonetic detail in speech perception. These research directions are currently pursued by largely disjoint research communities, and the innovations are seldom combined within the scope of a single study. We argue that it is the combination of all these approaches that holds the key to an integrated understanding of how phonetic variation is produced, performed, and perceived in its social context.

An increasing number of sociolinguists are using mixed effects models, models which allow for the inclusion of both fixed and random predicting variables. In most analyses, random effect intercepts are treated as a by-product of the model; they are viewed simply as a way to fit a more accurate model. This paper presents additional uses for random effect intercepts within the context of two case studies. Specifically, this paper demonstrates how random intercepts can be exploited to assist studies of speaker style and identity and to normalize for vocal tract size within certain linguistic environments. We argue that, in addition to adopting mixed effect modeling more generally, sociolinguists should view random intercepts as a potential tool during analysis.