My dissertation examined how socioindexical cues like high-rising terminals (also known as 'uptalk') shape listeners' real-time perceptions of speakers.
Using a series of eye-tracking experiments, I investigated how different cues individually and jointly contribute to participants' judgments about speakers' social identities.
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.