Angela Krak Presents: "¿Qué se [s]abe [s̪]abe [s̪θ]abe sobre el impacto de rasgos sociales en la codificación de la lengua? Testing socially weighted encoding in Seville, Spain"

¿Qué se [s]abe [s̪]abe [s̪θ]abe sobre el impacto de rasgos sociales en la codificación de la lengua? Testing socially weighted encoding in Seville, Spain

Angela Krak

How do social variables such as prestige or stigma affect speech perception and representation? How might these variables interact with other factors such as familiarity and salience? Recent psycholinguistic research (Sumner, King, Kim, & McGowan, 2014) has challenged previous models of speech processing and encoding, instead suggesting a dual-processing model that not only recognizes factors such as frequency, but also the weight of social variables on speech perception early in processing. To my knowledge, no research has tested how social weighting may impact basic speech perception processes of languages other than English.

To explore these questions, I examined the perception of three Peninsular varieties of Spanish by native speakers in Seville, Spain. Four tasks were conducted in order to analyze language attitudes, immediate processing, and long-term effects: rating task, semantic relatedness judgement task, false memory task, and sociolinguistic interview. Materials in each task contained words with three allophones of /s/, produced by six native Spaniards and associated with different levels of perceived prestige: central Spain (standard, [s]) Seville capital (regional standard, [s̪]) and Seville outskirts (stigmatized, [s̪θ]) (Penny, 2004). These four tasks not only allow for a comprehensive analysis of language attitudes in Seville, but also permit the investigation of how these varieties are perceived and encoded in the lexicon of the Seville capital natives.

I anticipated that if social weighting affects immediate processing, then in the semantic relatedness judgment task, speakers from Seville capital would have higher error rates and longer reaction times for pairs containing stigmatized [s̪θ] productions. Additionally, if long term memory is impacted, I predicted that participants would show higher rates of false recall associated with the stigmatized [s̪θ] variant, and equal rates between their own variety and the prestigious central norm. Results indicate that though there are clear differences in the language attitudes associated with these three varieties, both psycholinguistic tasks yielded null results. I hypothesize that the role of experience of the listeners and the familiarity of the varieties has allowed them to be perceptually flexible, perhaps diminishing any effects of social weighting on both processing and memory.

Key words: dialectal variation, speech perception, Peninsular Spanish, exemplar theory