Perceiving Personae: Effects of Social Information on Perceptions of TRAP-backing

Studies have shown that perceived macro-social categories like location of origin, age and class can influence listeners ’ perceptions of linguistic variables. Other work in sociolinguistics has demonstrated that variables can index multiple social meanings, often associable with personae that are more specific and complex than macro-social categories. This paper brings together these lines of inquiry, testing how persona-based social information influences linguistic expectations in a vowel categorization task. The experiment examines multiple social meanings of one sociolinguistic variable: the backing of the TRAP vowel. By virtue of its patterning in California, TRAP-backing has social meanings related to macro-social Californian location of origin, as well as to Californian social types like the Valley Girl. The feature has separately been associated with professional, formal personae. In a vowel categorization task, listeners categorized continua of ambiguous auditory words as either containing a TRAP vowel (e.g., SACK) or a LOT vowel (e.g., SOCK). Prior to the task, listeners were either told that the speaker was from California (macro-social information), the speaker had ‘been described as ’ a Valley Girl, or a Business Professional (persona-based information), or they were not given any speaker information (Baseline). Listeners in both the macro-social and persona-based information conditions were more likely to respond to a given token as TRAP than listeners in the Baseline condition