Regional identity and listener perception
As numerous chapters in this volume explore, better understanding the perception of linguistic variation is crucial to a range of sociolinguistic enterprises, including the larger goal of uncovering the principles underlying sound change. In previous research comparing speakers’ vowel boundary categorization and vowel production, we have attempted to explore directly the underlying assumption of most sociolinguistic work of a linkage between how speech forms are produced and perceived by examining differences in vowel identification patterns across regional groups and individual talker-listeners. This work has suggested that regional differences in vowel production, such as that found for the mid-front vowels in the South and the North, correlates with significant differences in vowel perception (Fridland & Kendall 2012; Kendall & Fridland 2012). In the present project, we investigate how providing regionally contextualizing information about a speaker might affect how listeners perform on this same vowel identification task. While the perception study as originally designed provided no contextual or social information about the stimuli speaker, in the current study we administer the identical vowel identification study, only this time adding a talker description that explicitly locates the speaker’s hometown in the North, South, or West. Building on our earlier work exploring the relationship between production and perception, we examine here how the addition of this contextualization affected how listeners identified vowel categories in an attempt to understand how social stereotypes and local identity alter listeners’ identification of category boundaries. We undertake this work within the framework of both previous experimental phonetic research and sociolinguistically oriented work on perception. One of the major long-standing pursuits of sociolinguistics has been to understand the origins and spread of sound change. However, empirical research examining the role of perception in the actuation and dissemination of socially based language change has, for the most part, been neglected, though it is often assumed to be at the heart of transmission of such change (Labov 2001; Ohala 1981, 1989). While the exact nature of the role of speech perception in sound change may not be without debate (see Solé and Recasens (2012) for fuller treatment of this issue) the fact that speech perception is highly Germane to discussions of sociolinguistic variation in production should not be.
