An individual person's pronunciation and speech processing are not constant, changing with contextual factors like who they are (or think they are) talking/listening to, what the topic is, and even subtle shifts in dialect expectations based on associative priming. What is not established is whether and how these contextual factors affect different people, and whether they affect speech production and perception processes in the same way.
In this study, Ms. Abigail Walker will investigate how identity, linguistic experience and linguistic prestige constrain the effects of topic of conversation and associative priming on linguistic processing. The study focuses on the behavior of American and English expatriates, and fans of English Premier League (EPL) soccer and American football in the U.S. and the U.K., and measures shifts/ adaptations between Standard American English (SAE) and Standard British English (SBE). Walker uses experimental techniques (a naming task and sentence intelligibility in noise) combined with rich interview data to see how different associative primes of SAE and SBE affect people with different identity relations to the primes, and different levels of exposure to the primed dialects.
The results will critically lead to tighter predictions on when we expect to see intraspeaker shifting, and could prompt the serious incorporation of identity into cognitive models of speech processing. Critically, by comparing production and perception shifts within speakers, Ms. Walker can compare whether identity affects production and perception in similar ways (i.e., do positive identity relations to a prime result in both production shifts and perceptual adaptations to that dialect?), which has implications for the production-perception interface. Funding this proposal will enhance the training of a promising graduate student.
