The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables

Forty-one Detroit-area residents were given perceptual tests in which they were asked to choose from a set of resynthesized vowels the tokens that they felt best matched the vowels they heard in the speech of a fellow Detroiter. Half of the respondents were told that the speaker was from Detroit, whereas half were told that she was from Canada. Respondents given the Canadian label chose raised-diphthong tokens as those present in the dialect of the speaker, whereas those given the Michigan label did not. Respondents given the Michigan label chose vowels that were quite different from the Northern Cities Chain-Shifted variety present in the speaker’s dialect. Because the “speaker’s ” perceived nation-ality was the only aspect that varied between the two groups of respondents, this label alone must have caused the difference in the selection of tokens. This indicates that listen-ers use social information in speech perception. Various studies from the fields of acoustic phonetics, sociolinguis-tics, and social psychology suggest that a variety of different factors are used by listeners in the perception and interpretation of speaker dialect. For instance, researchers have used acoustic phonetics to pro