Annette D’Onofrio (Northwestern University) will give an online colloquium. Here is the Zoom link.
Ideologies and sociolinguistic representations: Evidence from memory
Work combining sociolinguistic theory with speech perception has blossomed in recent decades, highlighting the significant impact of social knowledge on the processes of perceiving, evaluating, and interpreting speech (for overviews, see, e.g., Drager 2010; Sumner et al. 2014; Babel 2016; Babel, Campbell-Kibler, & McGowan 2025, among many others). Sociolinguists and phoneticians alike have argued that social perceptions of language should not be seen as independent from, or occurring in parallel to, linguistic perception. Instead, social and linguistic processing are intertwined and bi-directional. Building on earlier studies that show how broader social categories influence lower-level speech perception, more recent research has further examined what exactly constitutes “sociolinguistic knowledge” for listeners, and the types of cognitive processes that can be influenced by this knowledge. In this talk, I will present two studies in this vein, focusing on the impact of ideological constructs, such as personae and sociolinguistic stereotypes, on listener memory and social evaluations of speech. I suggest that sociolinguistic ideologies play a critical role in shaping how cognitive representations of sociolinguistic information are formed and deployed in perception.
References
Babel, A. M. (Ed.). (2016). Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Babel, A. M., CampbellKibler, K., & McGowan, K. B. (2025). Introduction to the thematic issue. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 29(1), 4458.
Drager, K. (2010), Sociophonetic Variation in Speech Perception. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4: 473-480.
Sumner M., Kim S.K., King E. & McGowan K.B, (2014) The socially weighted encoding of spoken words: a dual-route approach to speech perception. Front. Psychol. 4:1015
