Real-time speaker evaluation: How useful is it, and what does it measure?

The role of internal constraints and stylistic congruence on a variant's social impact

“…Speakers’ stylistic use of clusters of features means it is likely that listeners have experience with such clusters, and use cues across multiple variables when construing social information. First, listeners make social judgments based on multiple features together, as shown in studies that ask listeners to make social judgments as they are listening to a speech sample, updating their responses over time, allowing analysts to infer the aspects of the speech that affected listeners’ inferences about the speaker (e.g., Austen & Campbell-Kibler, 2022; Montgomery & Moore, 2018; Watson & Clark, 2013, 2015). Second, stylistically congruent variants are linked in mental representation (Campbell-Kibler, 2012; Levon, 2007; Vaughn & Kendall, 2019; Wade, 2022).…”

“…Some work has indicated that a variable's internal constraints, or the linguistic factors that probabilistically predict a particular variant, can affect a variant's social influence (Austen, 2020; Bender, 2005; Drager, 2010; Freitag, 2020; Labov, 2003; Podesva, Reynolds, Callier, & Baptiste, 2015). Other work suggests that listeners’ social inferences are affected by the presence of multiple variants together (Austen & Campbell-Kibler, 2022; Campbell-Kibler, 2009; Levon, 2014; Montgomery & Moore, 2018; Pharao, Maegaard, Møller, & Kristiansen, 2014; Watson & Clark, 2013, 2015). In both cases, these effects are likely due to expectations that listeners have built up about the likelihood of encountering a variant in a particular context.…”