Are you a fan? Investigating the role of identity in intra-speaker / intra-listener variation

old_uid11794
titleAre you a fan? Investigating the role of identity in intra-speaker / intra-listener variation
start_date2012/11/09
schedule11h
onlineno
location_infoA
detailsCycle : Sociophonétique
summaryTopic/prime based shifts in production and perception are analogous   to accommodation and adaptation effects respectively, except that   there is no interlocutor to converge towards, and no speaker to adapt   to. Rather, in this class of intra-person variation, speakers and   listeners shift their production (Blom & Gumperz 1972; Becker 2009;   Rickford & McNair Knox 1994; Mendoza-Denton, Hay & Jannedy 2003) and   perception (Hay, Warren & Drager 2010; Hay, Nolan & Drager 2006; Hay   & Drager 2010) because a dialect has been associatively primed,   through the topic or other means. Such shifts could be explained as unmediated responses to the prime,   whereby a primed dialect will always result in a shift in production/ perception, provided that the person has sufficient exposure to the   dialect. However, recent work has suggested that topic/priming   effects are dependent upon the identity of participants (Drager, Hay   & Walker 2010). In this talk, I report on a recent study (Love &   Walker, to appear), where we interviewed English and American fans of   English Premier League (EPL) soccer about American football. Overall,   we found that speakers were more rhotic (a feature of Standard   American English) when discussing American football than soccer.   However, non-significant trends in the data suggest that this effect   did not hold in English speakers who were not fans of American   football, independent of their exposure to American English. This   suggests that simply priming a dialect region may not be sufficient   to observe shifts in production; you may also need to prime an identity I am currently expanding on this study to further investigate and   compare the role that identity may play in production and perception,   and will present the results of a pilot perception study where I look   at whether participants improve their recognition of 'accented' words   in noise if that accent is primed. ------ Bio : Abby Walker is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at   The Ohio State University. She received an M.A. in Linguistics from   the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her primary area of   interest is sociophonetics, with a particular interest in the causes   of, and constraints on, intra-person variation in production as well   as in perception. Her dissertation focuses on the effect of the topic   of conversation and priming on shifts in the speech and perception of   sports fans, and whether/how such shifts are mediated by experience   and identity. Other current projects include examining the alignment   of socially meaningful variants in interaction and shadowing (with   Kodi Weatherholtz & Kathryn Campbell-Kibler), the acoustics of other- gender performance (with Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Shontael Wanjema &   Katie Carmichael), and how social perception of sociolinguistic   variants interacts with "linguistic internal" factors (in New Zealand   English, and in Puerto Rican Spanish). Recent publications: Abby Walker & Jennifer Hay. 2011. Congruence between ‘word age’ and   ‘voice age’ facilitates lexical access. Laboratory Phonology 1(2):   219-237. Drager, Katie, Jennifer Hay & Abby Walker. 2010. Pronounced   rivalries: Attitudes and speech production. Te Reo 53: 27-53.
responsiblesBel, Welby