Style in time : online perception of sociolinguistic cues
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Speakers use styles - combinations of socially meaningful sounds - to construct and project different social identities, or personae. How do listeners recognize these sounds as belonging to a particular linguistic style, spoken by a particular kind of person? Sociolinguistic work has shown that the contribution of individual speech features (or cues) is highly mutable, and context-dependent - suggesting that listeners must integrate the meaning contributions of individual cues with all the other social impressions that arise when hearing someone talk. In this dissertation, I ask how and when they do so. I present results from a series of web-based experiments that ask how two cues - -in' (vs. -ing) and HRT ('uptalk') - modulate listeners' implicit, online inferences, and explicit, offline judgments about two social personae; a Tough and a Valley Girl speaker. I first show that the contribution of these cues on explicit, offline judgments is dependent on the contextual information available to listeners: sociolinguistic cues don't vary just in the range of meanings they elicit, but also in the degree to which they give rise to specific meanings. I then show that listeners rapidly reconcile the meaning contributions of sociolinguistic cues when making inferences about a speaker's persona, and that the extent to which listeners' online and offline beliefs are modulated by a given cue is broadly proportional to the cue's socioindexical informativity. I then ask whether these results generalize to an additional set of four voices: I show that they do, and that listeners weigh the meaning contributions of a cue against their existing expectations about the speaker. Finally, I show that when faced with conflicting information about a speaker's persona, listeners will variably weight the contribution of a given cue based on voice-specific detail. Together, these results point to a probabilistic account of sociolinguistic perception in which listeners integrate various sources of contextual and linguistic information, but prioritize and place the greatest weight on the most informative aspects. This dissertation draws on insights from the cognitive sciences in systematically investigating problems and phenomena that are central to the study of sociolinguistic style. In doing so, it provides a methodological and conceptual framework for future experimentation and theorization.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Leigh, Daisy Dorothy |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Degen, Judith |
| Degree supervisor | Podesva, Robert |
| Thesis advisor | Degen, Judith |
| Thesis advisor | Podesva, Robert |
| Thesis advisor | Eckert, Penelope |
| Degree committee member | Eckert, Penelope |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Daisy Dorothy Leigh. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/df246px3344 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Daisy Dorothy Leigh
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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