Description:

Listeners engage social knowledge and attitudes about speakers in processes of speech perception (Niedzielski 1999; Drager 2011; Levon 2014), and correspondingly construct and modify cognitive representations of sociolinguistic information (Sumner et al. 2014). However, relatively little is known about the structure of sociolinguistic representations and their relation to cognitive processes. This dissertation explores the social factors that influence linguistic memory as a way to understand how sociolinguistic representations are formed in the mind. While sociolinguistic memory remains largely understudied, some experimental work has illustrated that speech recognition is biased to support listeners’ pre-existing social expectations, (D’Onofrio 2021), illustrating the ways in which social ideologies and attitudes guide how listeners 1) remember information in speech and 2) recognize the use of a socially coded prosodic contour, uptalk. Specifically, my dissertation explores the influence of gender ideologies on sociolinguistic memory, as instances of metalinguistic commentary reveal biases against women’s voices and the linguistic features associated with them (Gross 2015). In three experiments, I analyzed listeners’ recall of speech content and recognition of speakers’ use of falling and rising utterances, the latter of which interpreted as tokens of uptalk. In Study 1, I assess whether participants’ memory for a speaker’s use of rising and falling utterances were conditioned by the speaker’s perceived gender. Study 2 tests the extent to which listeners falsely recognized rising utterances when this contour was never produced by their speaker, investigating rates at which listeners falsely recognized rising tokens when listening to speakers perceived as men versus women. In Study 3, I then analyze whether patterns exhibited in Study 1 persisted when listeners were primed with brief metalinguistic commentary on uptalk. Exploratory analyses following the main experiments illustrate that listeners’ attitudes regarding standard language ideology and uptalk modulated the rate at which they recognize falling and rising utterances. Listeners’ performance across these tasks reveal the ways in which ideological factors, including listeners’ attitudes and the perceived gender of the speaker, influencing what linguistic information is stored in memory and thus cognitively represented.