Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Expectation-driven convergence occurs when speakers shift their speech to approximate the language they expect rather than observe from their interlocutor. In Wade (2022), participants produced more monophthongal /aI/—a salient feature of Southern U.S. English—after hearing other Southern-accented features. Here, by decoupling acoustic and social information with a dialect-label manipulation task, we investigate what types of cognitive associations account for this behavior: indirect socially-mediated associations that rely on recognizing that monophthongal /aI/ and other Southern-accented variants are both associated with the social category “Southern,” or direct associations between variants that rely on tracking their common co-occurrence at the individual level. We find that both acoustic and social-label cues trigger convergence, but in-group speakers from the South rely on acoustic cues, while out-group speakers from outside of the South are best cued by social-category labels. Results indicate a crucial role of dialect experience in the encoding and utilization of sociolinguistic knowledge.
Source: Glossa Psycholinguistics
DOI: 10.5070/g6011187
Authors: Lacey R Wade, David Embick, Meredith Tamminga
Institutions: University of Kansas, University of Pennsylvania
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4388411339