Alderton, R. orcid.org/0000-0001-8538-8531 (2020) Speaker gender and salience in sociolinguistic speech perception: GOOSE-fronting in Standard Southern British English. Journal of English Linguistics, 48 (1). pp. 72-96. ISSN 0075-4242
Abstract
Listeners’ perceptions of sound changes may be influenced by priming them with social information about the speaker. It is not clear, however, whether this occurs for sociolinguistic variables that pass below the level of awareness. This article investigates whether visual speaker gender affects the perception of GOOSE-fronting in Standard Southern British
English, a sound change that is led by young women yet does not fulfil criteria for sociolinguistic salience. Participants from across the United Kingdom completed a word identification experiment based on a gender-ambiguous synthesised FLEECE-GOOSE continuum while primed with an image of a man’s or a woman’s face. The study did not find a significant main effect of priming, but men identified fronter tokens as GOOSE when primed with a woman’s face. I argue that sociolinguistic priming effects may be over-stated and that future priming experiments should be designed with maximal statistical power where possible.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 The Author(s). This is an author-produced version of a paper subsequently published in Journal of English Linguistics. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | gender; salience; sociophonetics; speech perception; visual priming |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 16 Dec 2019 11:58 |
Last Modified: | 04 May 2021 13:40 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0075424219896400 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:154608 |
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