Listeners use indexical links—associations between social characteristics and linguistic variants—both to process speech and make social judgments. For example, an American might use a link between southern British speakers and the production of BATH words with [ɑ:] (e.g. bath → [bɑ:θ], glass → [glɑ:s]) both to interpret a production [glɑ:s] as glass rather than gloss when listening to a British speaker, and to judge a production of glass as [glɑ:s] as sounding British. Using the TRAP/BATH split in RP (Britain’s prestige dialect) and southern British Englishes, this dissertation examines three facets of these links: first, what linguistic categories (e.g. words or phonemes) are involved; second, how these categories might change as a listener gains more experience with southern British English; and third, whether the same indexical links—involving the same linguistic categories—are used both for linguistic perception (processing speech) and sociolinguistic perception (making social judgments).
RP speakers produce BATH words with [ɑ:]—which British listeners perceive as high-status—but TRAP words with [a] or [æ]. This split is phonologically conditioned ([ɑ:] occurs before /f, θ, s/) but has lexical exceptions (e.g. [gas] rather than the expected [gɑ:s]). Northern British and general American English speakers, who lack the split, are hypothesized to link [ɑ:], RP (and related attributes like “high-status”), and a linguistic category from their own dialect: either their phoneme /æ/ (/æ/↔RP [ɑ:]) [or /a/ for northern British speakers, who produce TRAP with [a] rather than the general American [æ]]; /æ/ in a conditioning environment (e.g. /æ/ before voiceless fricatives↔RP [ɑ:]); or individual words (e.g. `bath’↔RP [bɑ:θ]). Listeners with phoneme- level links would incorrectly expect RP speakers to say tr[ɑ:]p; listeners with conditioned-phoneme links would incorrectly expect g[ɑ:]s but correctly expect tr[a]p; and listeners with word-level links would have accurate expectations. The three experiments in this dissertation compare listeners with varying degrees of experience with southern British English, testing whether more-experienced listeners are more likely to have word-level links. In these experiments, listeners complete both linguistic and sociolinguistic perception tasks, testing whether individuals are consistent in which linguistic category they use for linguistic versus sociolinguistic perception.
All three experiments examine linguistic perception using a lexical decision task, where participants judge whether productions like b[ɑ:]th, g[ɑ:]s, and tr[ɑ:]p are real words. Sociolinguistic perception is examined using a sentence version task, in which participants judge whether a sentence sounds higher-status when it is produced with [ɑ:] or with [a]. If the same links are accessed by linguistic and sociolinguistic perception, individuals should show the same patterns of generalization across tasks: for example, a listener who thinks tr[ɑ:]p is a word should associate tr[ɑ:]p with high social status.
In Experiment 1, every participant accepted more b[ɑ:]th-type than tr[ɑ:]p-type items in the lexical decision task, indicating sensitivity to the split’s lexical and/or phonological conditioning. However, in the social perception tasks, many participants lacked this sensitivity, associating both b[ɑ:]th- and tr[ɑ:]p-type items with high social status. This mismatch would suggest that the indexical links used in sociolinguistic perception are different from, and more likely to involve phonemes than, those used in linguistic perception.
Experiments 2 and 3 tested whether this apparent mismatch was simply a result of the choice of sociolinguistic task, and whether participants might exhibit more sensitivity to the the split's lexical/phonological conditioning in a different sociolinguistic perception task. In these experiments, participants completed the same lexical decision and sentence version tasks as in Experiment 1, along with an additional sociolinguistic perception task. Both experiments replicated the mismatch between the lexical decision and sentence version tasks found in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, the additional sociolinguistic perception task (a scale-rating matched guise task) patterned with the sentence version task, such that participants who were more sensitive to the lexical/phonological conditioning of the split in one task were also more sensitive to it in the other—suggesting that these different sociolinguistic perception tasks accessed the same indexical links. However, in Experiment 2 there was no correlation in how participants performed between the sentence version task and the additional sociolinguistic perception task (matching [a]/[ɑ:] pronunciations to imaginary TV characters of different social backgrounds)—suggesting that there is not a single “sociolinguistic indexical link” that is accessed by any sociolinguistic perception task. Even so, in the character-matching task participants still tended to generalize the social meaning of [ɑ:] outside of the appropriate phonological/lexical environment, associating pronunciations like tr[ɑ:]p with high-status characters. These results leave open the question of whether the same indexical links are used in linguistic versus sociolinguistic perception, but suggest that sociolinguistic perception tasks are more likely to access phoneme-level links.
Across experiments, in both linguistic and sociolinguistic perception listeners with more experience with southern British English generally had more accurate (word-level) indexical links. This result suggests that more experience yields stronger word-level links for the TRAP/BATH split.