Annette D'Onofrio (Northwestern Universi ty) will give an online colloquium. Here is the Zoom link.
Ideologies and sociolinguis tic representations: Evidence from memory
Work combining sociolinguistic theory with speech perception has b lossomed in recent decades\, highlighting the significant impact of social knowledge on the processes of perceiving\, evaluating\, and interpreting sp eech (for overviews\, see\, e.g.\, Drager 2010\; Sumner et al. 2014\; Babel 2016\; Babel\, Campbell-Kibler\, & McGowan 2025\, among many others). Soci olinguists and phoneticians alike have argued that social perceptions of la nguage should not be seen as independent from\, or occurring in parallel to \, linguistic perception. Instead\, social and linguistic processing are in tertwined and bi-directional. Building on earlier studies that show how bro ader social categories influence lower-level speech perception\, more recen t research has further examined what exactly constitutes “sociolinguistic k nowledge” 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 pers onae and sociolinguistic stereotypes\, on listener memory and social evalua tions of speech. I suggest that sociolinguistic ideologies play a critical role in shaping how cognitive representations of sociolinguistic informatio n are formed and deployed in perception.
R eferences
Babel\, A. M. (Ed.). (2016). Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research. Cambridge: Cambrid ge University Press.
Babel\, A. M.\, Campb ellKibler\, K.\, & McGowan\, K. B. (2025). Introduction to the thematic iss ue. Journal of Sociolinguistics\, 29(1)\, 4458.
Drager\, K. (2010)\, Sociophonetic Variation in Speech Perce ption. 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 d
ual-route approach to speech perception. Front. Psychol. 4:1015