Bewertung und Grammatikalität regionaler Syntax.

Abstract

This paper addresses how morphosyntactic variation stemming from the Alemannic regional variety is perceived, evaluated, and judged in written and spoken language. Based on data from a questionnaire and speeded grammaticality judgments, this study examines which grammatical variants are salient to the listener as a function of speaker accent (regional vs. standard) and listener background (students from different school types and cities). The results show that, in addition to the regional morphosyntax, regional accent co-determines grammaticality judgements, in particular for naive listeners. Expert listener (students of language and literature) judgements are less affected by speaker accent, and appear to follow their subjective normative expectations concerning the prescriptive syntax usage. The most normative judgments on both syntactic and phonological levels were observed for dialectal variants within a group of high school students, despite being active users of the Alemannic variety. This result is a likely consequence of an explicit discard of dialect usage during classroom interactions.

Navigating accent bias in German: children's social preferences for a second-language accent over a first-language regional accent

“…An alternative explanation pertains to the acoustic and perceptual cues of the accents themselves. Several studies have demonstrated that factors such as familiarity, listening effort, and pronunciation distance can influence how individuals, including children, respond to L2 accents and regional varieties (Van Engen and Peelle, 2014;Bent, 2018;Hanulíková, 2019Hanulíková, , 2021Weatherhead et al, 2019;Bent et al, 2021). Listening effort is associated with varying processing load for different degrees of acoustic mismatch between speech produced by a speaker and a listener's variety (Van Engen and Peelle, 2014).…”

“…Second-language (L2) varieties and first-language (L1) dialects often result in inferences about social group membership. Such inferences have been associated with negative consequences for various sociolinguistic and social phenomena, including bias and unfavorable evaluations (e.g., Gluszek and Dovidio, 2010;Lippi-Green, 2012;Fiedler et al, 2019;Hanulíková, 2019Hanulíková, , 2021. Previous research has consistently shown that monolingual children exhibit social preferences for novel speakers of their L1 or local variety over novel speakers of other languages or regional/learner varieties (Kinzler et al, 2007(Kinzler et al, , 2009(Kinzler et al, , 2011DeJesus et al, 2017).…”