[Somean] Martha Austen's dissertation defense

Mon Jun 1 13:24:43 EDT 2020

You are hereby invited to Martha Austen's dissertation defense:

The Role of Listener Experience in Perception of Conditioned Dialect Variation
June 10th
3:00-5:00pm

Zoom URL:  https://osu.zoom.us/j/95673298366?pwd=REFpUXBHeDdGSGpKRHgxOXZja1dLUT09
Meeting password: 416361
The dissertation abstract and the full Zoom invitation are listed below.

Please feel free to share this invitation with interested parties, but please do not post the meeting information to any public page or social media. Observers are asked to keep their video and audio turned off until the public question time at the end of the defense.

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics
The Ohio State University
318 Oxley Hall
campbell-kibler.1 at osu.edu<mailto:campbell-kibler.1 at osu.edu>

Abstract: The Role of Listener Experience in Perception of Conditioned Dialect Variation

Listeners use indexical links—associations between social characteristics and linguistic variants—both to
process speech and make social judgments. For example, an American might use a link between southern
British speakers and the production of BATH words with [ɑ:] (e.g. bath → [bɑ:θ], glass → [glɑ:s]) both to
interpret a production [glɑ:s] as glass rather than gloss when listening to a British speaker, and to judge a
production of glass as [glɑ:s] as sounding British. Using the TRAP/BATH split in RP (Britain’s prestige
dialect) and southern British Englishes, this dissertation examines three facets of these links: !rst, what
linguistic categories (e.g. words or phonemes) are involved; second, how these categories might change
as a listener gains more experience with southern British English; and third, whether the same indexical
links—involving the same linguistic categories—are used both for linguistic perception (processing
speech) and sociolinguistic perception (making social judgments).

RP speakers produce BATH words with [ɑ:]—which British listeners perceive as high-status—but TRAP
words with [a] or [æ]. This split is phonologically conditioned ([ɑ:] occurs before /f, θ, s/) but has
lexical exceptions (e.g. [gas] rather than the expected [gɑ:s]). Northern British and general American
English speakers, who lack the split, are hypothesized to link [ɑ:], RP (and related attributes like “highstatus”),
and a linguistic category from their own dialect: either their phoneme /æ/ (/æ/↔RP [ɑ:]) [or /
a/ for northern British speakers, who produce TRAP with [a] rather than the general American [æ]]; /æ/
in a conditioning environment (e.g. /æ/ before voiceless fricatives↔RP [ɑ:]); or individual words (e.g.
‘bath’↔RP [bɑ:θ]). Listeners with phoneme- level links would incorrectly expect RP speakers to say
tr[ɑ:]p; listeners with conditioned-phoneme links would incorrectly expect g[ɑ:]s but correctly expect
tr[a]p; and listeners with word-level links would have accurate expectations. The three experiments in
this dissertation compare listeners with varying degrees of experience with southern British English,
testing whether more-experienced listeners are more likely to have word-level links. In these
experiments, listeners complete both linguistic and sociolinguistic perception tasks, testing whether
individuals are consistent in which linguistic category they use for linguistic versus sociolinguistic
perception.

All three experiments examine linguistic perception using a lexical decision task, where judge whether
productions like b[ɑ:]th, g[ɑ:]s, and tr[ɑ:]p are real words. Sociolinguistic perception is examined using a
sentence version task, in which participants judge whether a sentence sounds higher-status when it is
produced with [ɑ:] or with [a]. If the same links are accessed by linguistic and sociolinguistic perception,
individuals should show the same patterns of generalization across tasks: for example, a listener who
thinks tr[ɑ:]p is a word should associate tr[ɑ:]p with high social status.

In Experiment 1, every participant accepted more b[ɑ:]th-type than tr[ɑ:]p-type items in the lexical
decision task, indicating sensitivity to the split’s lexical and/or phonological conditioning. However, in
the social perception tasks, many participants lacked this sensitivity, associating both b[ɑ:]th- and
tr[ɑ:]p-type items with high social status. This mismatch would suggest that the indexical links used in
sociolinguistic perception are di&erent from, and more likely to involve phonemes than, those used in
linguistic perception.

Experiments 2 and 3 tested whether this apparent mismatch was simply a result of the choice of
sociolinguistic task, and whether participants might exhibit more sensitivity to the the split's lexical/
phonological conditioning in a di&erent sociolinguistic perception task. In these experiments,
participants completed the same lexical decision and sentence version tasks as in Experiment 1, along
with an additional sociolinguistic perception task. Both experiments replicated the mismatch between
the lexical decision and sentence version tasks found in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, the additional
sociolinguistic perception task (a scale-rating matched guise task) patterned with the sentence version
task, such that participants who were more sensitive to the lexical/phonological conditioning of the split
in one task were also more sensitive to it in the other—suggesting that these di&erent sociolinguistic
perception tasks accessed the same indexical links. However, in Experiment 2 there was no correlation in
how participants performed between the sentence version task and the additional sociolinguistic
perception task (matching [a]/[ɑ:] pronunciations to imaginary TV characters of di&erent social
backgrounds)—suggesting that there is not a single "sociolinguistic indexical link" that is accessed by any
sociolinguistic perception task. Even so, in the character-matching task participants still tended to
generalize the social meaning of [ɑ:] outside of the appropriate phonological/lexical environment,
associating pronunciations like tr[ɑ:]p with high-status characters. These results leave open the question
of whether the same indexical links are used in linguistic versus sociolinguistic perception, but suggest
that sociolinguistic perception tasks are more likely to access phoneme-level links.

Across experiments, in both linguistic and sociolinguistic perception listeners with more experience with
southern British English generally had more accurate (word-level) indexical links. This result suggests
that more experience yields stronger word-level links for the TRAP/BATH split.

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Topic: Martha Austen dissertation defense
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