It don't go both ways: Limited bidirectionality in sociolinguistic perception

Abstract

This article explores the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation, using sociolinguistic priming experiments. Two experiments tested participants' perception of the connection between social status and variation in two English subject-verb agreement constructions: there's+NP and NP+don't. Experiment 1 tested sentence perception and found that exposure to non-standard agreement boosted the perception of nonstandard agreement, but only for there's+NP. Social status cues had no effect on sentence perception. Experiment 2 tested speaker perception and found that participants were more likely to believe that non-standard agreement was produced by low-status than high-status speakers. Results suggest that, especially for heavily stigmatized variables, non-standard sentences strongly constrain the social judgments made by speakers, yet social cues do not necessarily constrain linguistic perception. The results suggest that the perceptual relationship between linguistic and social knowledge may be one of only limited bidirectionality. Implications for sociolinguistic perception and exemplar-theoretic accounts of sociolinguistic competence are discussed.

Can kiwis and koalas as cultural primes induce perceptual bias in Australian English speaking listeners?

“…This explanation has been offered in previous experiments. For example, Squires (2013) acknowledged that the lack of an observable priming effect may have been due to the primes not working as expected. If the effect reported in Hay and Drager (2010) relies on a strong association between the toy, its elicited dialect, and relevant dialectal variation, then it is possible that the toy kiwis were not culturally significant enough to activate 'New Zealand' for our participants.…”

“…This result echoes Squires' (2013) argument in favor of a more limited expectation of bidirectionality between linguistic and indexical influences on perception. In a morphosyntactic paradigm, Squires (2013) found that linguistic information influenced impressions about a speaker's social status but socioeconomic cues did not influence perception of non-standard speech.…”

Mother-tongue education, linguistic variation and language processing

“…he study of the cognitive and perceptual dimensions of linguistic variation has been progressively highlighted in the literature on linguistic processing and is currently a relevant research topic (Campbell-Kibler 2009, 2010Labov et al, 2011;Squires, 2013Squires, , 2014. Squires (2013) points out that recent studies in speech perception report that linguistic perception is inluenced by social information just as social perception is inluenced by linguistic cues.…”

Labov in sociolinguistics: An introduction

“…), and it is pursued with increasingly sophisticated methods by the present generation of scholars (e.g. Campbell‐Kibler ; Squires ).…”