Description:

Annette D’Onofrio
Stanford University

Social Meaning in Linguistic Perception

Work in sociolinguistics has repeatedly shown that linguistic variation is socially informative. This work has traditionally examined correlations between linguistic features and macro-social groups, such as gender, socioeconomic class, or region of origin. However, more recent approaches have focused on the ways that speakers use linguistic styles — socially meaningful bundles of features — to construct identities in interaction. In this view, styles are associated with holistic social personae, which are more immediately relevant in interactions than macro-social categories. While the body of work on sociolinguistic style is growing, little is known about the cognitive basis of links between features of linguistic styles and social meanings. In this talk, I explore how listeners integrate social meanings in perceptions of language, at different levels of awareness. Using four experimental paradigms, I examine how a single phonetic feature is connected with multiple social meanings in introspective social evaluations, in early and automatic linguistic perceptions, and in memory. I also explore the nature of the social meanings that can be connected with language, focusing on how information about a speaker’s holistic persona can influence perceptual behavior. Together, these studies show that social knowledge of a speaker is integral to linguistic perception, and that knowledge related to a speaker’s holistic persona can show as strong an influence on linguistic perception as macro-social information. These studies not only demonstrate the perceptual basis of connections between social meanings and linguistic features, they also support models of speech perception that crucially incorporate top-down social expectations and ideologies, as these expectations are intertwined with processing and encoding even at automatic levels.