Dynamic sociolinguistic processing: Real-time changes in judgments of speaker competence

Levon, Erez; Sharma, Devyani; Ye, Yang (2022). Dynamic sociolinguistic processing: Real-time changes in judgments of speaker competence. Language, 98(4), pp. 749-774. Linguistic Society of America http://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2022.0020

[img] Text
LevonEtAl-LANG.pdf - Accepted Version
Restricted to registered users only
Available under License Publisher holds Copyright.

Download (5MB)

Social category information plays a central role in speech perception and processing. To date, research on this topic has struggled to model how social category perceptions evolve over the time course of an interaction. In this article, we build on recent methodological developments to investigate trajectories of listener perceptions, focusing on how impressions change as linguistic, social and contextual details emerge. We base our arguments on an analysis of listeners’ real-time evaluations of the perceived competence of speakers of two British regional accents during a mock interview for a job in a law firm. Results indicate a need to move away from the view, predominant in sociolinguistics, of category perception as a discrete phenomenon toward a model of perception as inference under uncertainty. We discuss implications for theories of sociolinguistic cognition and for understandings of accent bias.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Other Institutions > Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBKolleg) > Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS)

UniBE Contributor:

Levon, Erez

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology
400 Language
400 Language > 410 Linguistics
400 Language > 420 English & Old English languages

ISSN:

0097-8507

Publisher:

Linguistic Society of America

Language:

English

Submitter:

Erez Levon

Date Deposited:

13 Jun 2022 16:13

Last Modified:

03 Mar 2023 16:56

Publisher DOI:

http://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2022.0020

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/170578

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/170578

Actions (login required)

Edit item Edit item
Provide Feedback