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It don't go both ways: Limited bidirectionality in sociolinguistic perception[Note 1. I am grateful to Julie Boland, Robin Queen, Deborah ...]
Author(s) -
Squires Lauren
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of sociolinguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9841
pISSN - 1360-6441
DOI - 10.1111/josl.12025
Subject(s) - perception , psychology , sentence , variation (astronomy) , linguistics , priming (agriculture) , sociolinguistics , social perception , speech perception , verb , social psychology , cognitive psychology , philosophy , physics , germination , botany , neuroscience , astrophysics , biology
This article explores the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation, using sociolinguistic priming experiments. Two experiments tested participants' perception of the connection between social status and variation in two English subject‐verb agreement constructions: there's + NP and NP + don't . Experiment 1 tested sentence perception and found that exposure to non‐standard agreement boosted the perception of non‐standard agreement, but only for there's + NP . Social status cues had no effect on sentence perception. Experiment 2 tested speaker perception and found that participants were more likely to believe that non‐standard agreement was produced by low‐status than high‐status speakers. Results suggest that, especially for heavily stigmatized variables, non‐standard sentences strongly constrain the social judgments made by speakers, yet social cues do not necessarily constrain linguistic perception. The results suggest that the perceptual relationship between linguistic and social knowledge may be one of only limited bidirectionality. Implications for sociolinguistic perception and exemplar‐theoretic accounts of sociolinguistic competence are discussed.