Language & Social Interaction

Question 1

every time we say something the speech signal carries two different types of information:

Answer 1

• linguistic = “what was said”
• Indexical = “who said it”

Question 3

Bill Labov (1966) - The Social Stratification of English in New York City

Answer 3

–> examined the variable (r)
* sociolinguistic variable:a set of alternative ways of saying the same thing, where the alternatives will have social significance

Question 4

Norma Mendoza-Denton (1998)

Answer 4

–> explores the relationship between language and the body
* how elements of speech and bodily practices are used to signal social affiliation and come together to form youth gang styles

Question 5

Audience Design (Bell 1984)

Answer 5

speech style is essentially a speaker’s response to their audience

Question 6

Oprah Winfrey
* Hay et al (1999)

Answer 6

• examined Oprah’s variable use of [aɪ] and [a:]
• analyzed portions of the talk show where
• no guest on stage
• Oprah facing the camera
• addressing the studio and TV audience

Question 7

Speech Accommodation/speech convergence

Answer 7

• the process by which speakers’ linguistic behaviour comes together

Question 8

Babel (2010) shadowing task

Answer 8

• participants are asked to repeat aloud a word they are listening to
• check baseline pronunciation before the task
• check shadowed pronunciation
• if different – evidence for convergence (or divergence!)

Question 9

Abel & Babel (2017) - Lego Test

Answer 9

• pairs who engaged in less cognitively demanding LEGO tasks were perceived as converging with their partners when early and late parts of the task were compared
• in support of automatic models of the mechanisms underlying speech convergence

Question 10

language attitudes

Answer 10

social evaluations of speakers based on speech

Question 11

‘linguistic stereotyping’ (Lambertetal.1960)

Answer 11

listeners make stereotyped judgements about speakers’ personal traits based on speech alone

Question 12

Purnell, Idsardi & Baugh (1999)

Answer 12

Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification
Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18:10-29

Question 13

“Speaking While Black” (Baugh 2015)

Answer 13

the phenomenon by which African Americans experience discrimination, sight-unseen, because their speech may act as an indicator of their race