Sounds, attitudes, and meaning

• Applicant: Dr. Simon David Stein
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 530281155

Listeners do not only evaluate what someone says, but also how someone talks: they have so-called language attitudes towards languages and their varieties. For example, one language or variety (e.g., French, Southern Irish English) may be perceived as sounding more "pleasant" than another (e.g., German, Birmingham English). Such attitudes have serious political and social consequences, including discrimination. One of the big unsolved questions about language attitudes is how they emerge. Which factors lead us to have evaluative reactions towards language? One area of research, indexicality research, assumes that attitudes do not result from linguistic features themselves, but from how we perceive the groups of speakers who use these features. Another area, iconicity research, suggests that judgments are also influenced by the properties of the linguistic features themselves. Both hypotheses may contain truth, but little research investigates them simultaneously and tests directly how they interact. This project investigates the effects of both social predictors (indexicality research) and phonological-phonetic predictors (iconicity research) in the generation of language attitudes. Bringing the two research areas together, it asks which social and linguistic variables are predictive of (which) evaluative meaning associations, whether some associations are more reliably predicted by one of the two clusters of variables or the other, and whether we can find evidence for interactions between the two. It does so by eliciting attitudes in an increasingly experimentally controlled way: by having listeners react to (1) real, unmanipulated speech stimuli of languages and varieties, (2) to manipulated stimuli, in which some features are selectively replaced by others, and (3) to pseudovarieties, i.e., stimuli of non-existing varieties constructed from scratch. The studies will test a diverse set of languages from different families, as well as a set of different varieties of English. They will statistically model many evaluative dimensions (e.g., likeability, competence, beauty, intelligence) by different social predictors (e.g. exposure to language and cultural context, distance of stimuli to the listeners’ languages) and linguistic predictors (e.g., syllable structure, F0, sonority, voicing, isochrony). The project will culminate in the development of a new theoretical model of evaluative meaning, bringing together indexicality and iconicity in a unified theory. Finally, this project will create awareness outside the academic community with a dedicated science communication program to support the linguistically informed fight against linguistic discrimination. Ultimately, then, this project will help disentangle the social and linguistic mechanisms underlying evaluative form-meaning associations on an empirical level, better understand their nature on a theoretical level, and teach us how to better combat linguistic stereotyping on a societal level.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants