Explicit tracking of in-the-moment sociolinguistic evaluation
We examine listeners’ real-time reactions to (ING) in two talkers, one from California and one from North Carolina. As participants listened to a talker, they moved a slider to indicate their developing impression of how educated the talker sounded. Each participant heard a matched-guise stimulus from one talker, containing either only ING tokens, only IN tokens, or alternating clusters of ING and IN. For the California talker, (ING) showed a consistent effect across stimuli. The North Carolina talker, however, showed an effect only in alternating-cluster guises in which IN occurred first. While this disparity between talkers could reflect a flaw in the real-time methodology, we propose that it reflects differing effects of (ING) depending on listeners’ expectations about the talker, shaped by an interaction between the talker’s previous (ING) use and other cues. This suggests that contextual effects of talker accent on social meaning occur early during sociolinguistic evaluation.
