The role of context in sociolinguistic perception

Abstract

Previous research demonstrates that listeners make social inferences about people based on how they speak, and that these inferences vary depending on the linguistic and social context. An open question is exactly how contextual enrichment (i.e. information about the speaker and speaking situation) comes to influence sociolinguistic perception. This paper addresses this question by analyzing data from 10 perception experiments investigating three different linguistic phenomena: number agreement in existential there constructions, intonation contours in declarative sentences, and overlapping speech in conversation. We observe an overall trend that increasing contextual enrichment obscures the effects of linguistic forms. In contextually impoverished stimuli, number nonagreement and rising declaratives trigger perceptions that speakers are less educated and more polite, respectively, but show no effect on listener perceptions when embedded in more contextually rich stimuli. By contrast, overlapping speech shows robust effects on perceived interruptiveness, even in contextually rich stimuli. Drawing on theories from social psychology and linguistic anthropology, we argue that if listeners are able to form sufficient impressions of speakers before encountering the target linguistic feature, they will not modify their impressions to incorporate the social meanings conveyed by the target linguistic feature, unless these social meanings are highly enregistered.

Accent Bias and Perceptions of Professional Competence in England

“…We suggest that an increase in contextual enrichment correlates with a corresponding reliance on specific status characteristics to the exclusion of diffuse ones, like accent. Thus, while the findings of the current study may have revealed more nuanced effects of accent bias than in prior work, we argue that this discrepancy results from our examination of attitudes within a specific professional context and from the ways in which context interacts with attitude formation more generally (see, e.g., Cargile, Giles, Ryan & Bradac 1994;Gawronski, Ye, Rydell & De Houwer 2014;Hilton & Jeong 2019;Levon & Ye 2020).…”

“…We focus on this particular context since we are interested in exploring whether accent may impede social mobility and professional advancement. As prior work in both linguistics and psychology has demonstrated, attitudes to language and other forms of socially meaningful practice are contextually situated, such that the evaluation of a behavior in one context does not necessarily apply in another (Gawronski, Ye, Rydell & De Houwer 2014;Nayakakuppam, Priester, Kwon, Donovan & Petty 2018;Hilton & Jeong 2019;Levon & Ye 2020). It is therefore not possible to assume that attitudes to language in a professional context will match those elicited in a more general (or "neutral") context (Ajzen 1991(Ajzen , 2005Campbell-Kibler 2009).…”

Contextual dilution in French gender inclusive writing: An experimental investigation

“…As we mentioned, our results are reminiscent of those found by Hilton &Jeong (2019), andBeltrama et al (2022): results involving the interpretation of sociolinguistic phenomena obtained in experiments with minimal context weaken or even disappear when the context becomes more detailed. We have named this phenomenon contextual dilution, and we suggest that it arises from how people process the information in the texts that they read.…”

Context, precision, and social perception: A sociopragmatic study

“…Secondly, context effects do not emerge consistently across the two experiments. To some extent these differences likely reflect differing methodological choices with respect to how the context was represented, and the relative weight of contextual content vs. instances of the variable under investigation (see Hilton & Jeong 2019 for related findings). But these effects could also indicate that respondents were sensitive to subtle aspects of the test scenarios beyond those reflecting the intended manipulations, calling for further research into how the way in which contextual information is represented experimentally affects the social perception of a particular variant.…”