What the Heck Is Salience? How Predictive Language Processing Contributes to Sociolinguistic Perception

Jaeger, T. Florian; Weatherholtz, Kodi

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01115

Cited by 45 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Careful sociolinguistic work is required to tease out the internal, subjective models that listeners induce from their experience with actual variation and use as the basis for socio‐indexical inferences. Critically, listeners’ models may diverge from the actual objective statistical properties of that variation (for discussion and references, see Jaeger & Weatherholtz, ). One advantage of our approach here is that is provides a formal, quantitative framework for connecting variation in the world to listeners’ internal models.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When an informative feature further facilitates the speed or accuracy of speech perception or word recognition, there is high utility in being sensitive to changes in its distribution. Although it is an open question whether all social effects on linguistic perception can be reduced to the informativity or utility of socio‐indexical features (for discussion, see Jaeger & Weatherholtz, ), the ideal adapter thus provides a potential explanation—from first principles—for the “social weighting” of speech perception (Sumner, ; Sumner et al., ).…”

Section: Our Approach: Inference Under Uncertaintymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sociolinguistic Perception as Inference Under Uncertainty

Kleinschmidt

Weatherholtz

Jaeger

2018

Topics in Cognitive Science

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Social and linguistic perceptions are linked. On one hand, talker identity affects speech perception. On the other hand, speech itself provides information about a talker's identity. Here, we propose that the same probabilistic knowledge might underlie both socially conditioned linguistic inferences and linguistically conditioned social inferences. Our computational-level approach-the ideal adapter-starts from the idea that listeners use probabilistic knowledge of covariation between social, linguistic, and acoustic cues in order to infer the most likely explanation of the speech signals they hear. As a first step toward understanding social inferences in this framework, we use a simple ideal observer model to show that it would be possible to infer aspects of a talker's identity using cue distributions based on actual speech production data. This suggests the possibility of a single formal framework for social and linguistic inferences and the interactions between them.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Our Approach: Inference Under Uncertaintymentioning

confidence: 99%

Sociolinguistic Perception as Inference Under Uncertainty

Kleinschmidt

Weatherholtz

Jaeger

2018

Topics in Cognitive Science

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“…As pointed out by Jaeger and Weatherholtz (2016), the term “salience” is rarely defined very precisely in the sociolinguistic literature and turns out to be rather hard to define precisely. For present purposes we will define it somewhat broadly in terms of relative prominence; to put it another way, something that is relatively salient is something that is relatively likely to attract attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Labov (1972), for instance, divided sociolinguistic variants into indicators, markers, and stereotypes based in large part on their level of salience, as reflected in their varying propensity to be involved in social stratification, style shifting, explicit meta‐commentary, hypercorrection, and stigmatization. Consequently, variants with higher salience are encoded with more attention and higher meta‐linguistic awareness, leading them to be more easily recognized and retained in memory than other variants with equal frequency (Sumner, Kim, King, & McGowan, 2014) resulting in a potential acquisition bias that cannot be explained by frequency of exposure alone (Jaeger & Weatherholtz, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, there is very little work on how the salience of a sociolinguistic variant is affected by prior experience of that variant in other contexts. Theoretically, Jaeger and Weatherholtz (2016) proposed that salience related to language experience can be better understood “with reference to prior expectations based on listeners' past language experience and the ensuing expectation violation that a listener experiences relative to those prior expectations” (p. 1). One analog they provided was the well‐attested novelty bias effect; that is, novel items and surprising events that we do not expect tend to stand out, gaining more attention and stronger encoding.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Experience With a Linguistic Variant Affects the Acquisition of Its Sociolinguistic Meaning: An Alien‐Language‐Learning Experiment

2020

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How do speakers learn the social meaning of different linguistic variants, and what factors influence how likely a particular social-linguistic association is to be learned? It has been argued that the social meaning of more salient variants should be learned faster, and that learners' preexisting experience of a variant will influence its salience. In this paper, we report two artificiallanguage-learning experiments investigating this. Each experiment involved two language-learning stages followed by a test. The first stage introduced the artificial language and trained participants in it, while the second stage added a simple social context using images of cartoon aliens. The first learning stage was intended to establish participants' experience with the artificial language in general and with the distribution of linguistic variants in particular. The second stage, in which linguistic stimuli were accompanied by images of particular aliens, was intended to simulate the acquisition of linguistic variants in a social context. In our first experiment, we manipulated whether a particular linguistic variant, associated with one species of alien in the second learning phase, had been encountered in the first learning phase. In the second experiment, we manipulated whether the variant had been encountered in the same grammatical context. In both cases we predicted that the unexpectedness of a new variant or a new grammatical context for an old variant would increase the variant's salience and facilitate the learning of its social meaning. This is what we found, although in the second experiment, the effect was driven by better learners. Our results suggest that unexpectedness increases the salience of variants and makes their social distribution easier to learn, deepening our understanding of the role of individual language experience in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning.

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Walker¹,

McAllister²

2023

The Handbook of Usage‐Based Linguistics

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What the Heck Is Salience? How Predictive Language Processing Contributes to Sociolinguistic Perception

Cited by 45 publications

References 53 publications

Sociolinguistic Perception as Inference Under Uncertainty

Sociolinguistic Perception as Inference Under Uncertainty

Experience With a Linguistic Variant Affects the Acquisition of Its Sociolinguistic Meaning: An Alien‐Language‐Learning Experiment

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