138 research outputs found
Experimental Research Methods in SociolinguisticsKatieDrager Bloomsbury Academic “Research Methods in Linguistics” series. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. 2018. 216 pp. PB 35.95 USD list price 23.39 GBP; HB 100 USD list price 67.50 GBP; EPUB/MOBI/PDF Ebook 32.35 USD list price 22.45 GBP.
No full textFor many of its research community, the study of sociolinguistics is quintessentially about understanding the use and variability of language in its natural social context, a context which is about as far removed as possible from what goes on in a laboratory setting. However, with the social‐indexical properties of speech and language now prominent in a great deal of theoretical debate around speech production, processing, and acquisition, many sociolinguists are now equally at home carrying out research in the laboratory as well as in the field, thereby opening up a rich seam of empirical sociolinguistic research and discovery.No Full Tex
Comments on "Downstep in Dutch: implications for a model" by R. van den Berg, C. Gussenhoven, and R. Rietveld
No full textListener evaluation of sociophonetic variability:probing constraints and capabilities
Get PDFThis paper reports the results of an experimental study designed to investigate how listeners learn to create new associations between phonetic properties of the speech signal and external social referents. Very little is known of how this learning takes place in children, and it is a particularly challenging area to study given the difficulty in controlling some of the variables which are likely to be important factors in children's learning of the productive and interpretative dimensions of social-indexical phonetic variation. Thus, in this study, we focus on adult listeners in order to develop a sense of how adults might approach this learning task, and also to test out a method for probing this form of learning in a controlled fashion. 49 participants were trained on new patterns of social-indexical variability and, in a subsequent test phase, we assessed the extent to which this training led the listeners to acquire new associations between specific realizational variants and the social categories with which they have been associated in the training material. Results are reported from four experimental conditions which provided listeners with a range of different learning tasks. Our findings suggest that learning of novel sociophonetic associations can be achieved as the result of a relatively short amount of exposure to training material incorporating the new association, but that the success with which learning takes place is dependent on a number of factors such as the nature of the criterial variable and individual learner variation.Full Tex
An evaluation of usage-based approaches to the modelling of sociophonetic variability
No full textThe aim of this paper is to provide a sociophonetic perspective on debate relating to the role of usage-based approaches in accounting for language variation. The bulk of the paper focuses on the potential inherent within exemplar-based models of phonological representation to account for the production, processing and acquisition of social-indexical information woven into the speech signal alongside lexical-propositional content. The critical evaluation which is developed within the paper focuses on the integration of the social-indexical channel with other strands of information within the speech signal, on the extent to which the performance of individual speakers is seen as relevant in accounts of production, perception and acquisition, and on how, within a usage-based approach such as an exemplar-model, an appropriate balance can be achieved between bottom-up and top-down processing of the phonetic substance contained within the speech signal.No Full Tex
Speech in its natural habitat: accounting for social factors in phonetic variability
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An acoustic analysis of short front vowel realizations in the conversational style of young English speakers from Western Australia
No full textThis study presents the findings of an analysis of short front vowel (SFV) realisations in a corpus of unscripted conversational speech generated by 40 young speakers from Perth. As well as providing the first comparative account of SFV realisations in that location, we consider the extent to which the realisational variability observed is associated with properties of the continuous unscripted speech style that are known to influence spectral and temporal properties of vowels.Full Tex
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