It don't go both ways: Limited bidirectionality in sociolinguistic perception

• Published in: Journal of sociolinguistics Vol. 17; no. 2; pp. 200 - 237
• Main Author: Squires, Lauren
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.04.2013; Blackwell
• Subjects: Competence; English; exemplar theory; existential there; invariant don't; Knowledge; Language Variation; Linguistics; Morphology Syntax Relationship; morphosyntactic variation; Perception; priming; social class; Social Status; Socioeconomic Status; Sociolinguistics; Sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics; subject-verb agreement; exemplar theory; priming; Sociolinguistics; Sociolinguistic variation; social class; Grammatical agreement; Morphosyntax; Speech perception; English; Social status; Social Perception; morphosyntactic variation; Perception; invariant don't; subject-verb agreement; existential there
• ISSN: 1360-6441; 1467-9841
• DOI: 10.1111/josl.12025

This article explores the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation, using sociolinguistic priming experiments. Two experiments tested participants' perception of the connection between social status and variation in two English subject‐verb agreement constructions: there's+NP and NP+don't. Experiment 1 tested sentence perception and found that exposure to non‐standard agreement boosted the perception of non‐standard agreement, but only for there's+NP. Social status cues had no effect on sentence perception. Experiment 2 tested speaker perception and found that participants were more likely to believe that non‐standard agreement was produced by low‐status than high‐status speakers. Results suggest that, especially for heavily stigmatized variables, non‐standard sentences strongly constrain the social judgments made by speakers, yet social cues do not necessarily constrain linguistic perception. The results suggest that the perceptual relationship between linguistic and social knowledge may be one of only limited bidirectionality. Implications for sociolinguistic perception and exemplar‐theoretic accounts of sociolinguistic competence are discussed.