Abstract
Previous work has demonstrated that certain speech patterns vary systematically between sociodemographic groups, so that in some cases the way a person speaks is a valid cue to group membership. Our work addresses whether or not participants use these linguistic cues when assessing a speaker's likely political identity. We use a database of speeches by U.S. Congressional representatives to isolate words that are statistically diagnostic of a speaker's party identity. In a series of four studies, we demonstrate that participants' judgments track variation in word usage between the two parties more often than chance, and that this effect persists even when potentially interfering cues such as the meaning of the word are controlled for. Our results are consistent with a body of literature suggesting that humans' language-related judgments reflect the statistical distributions of our environment.
Highlights
IntroductionWhat can you tell about someone who addresses a group of people as “you guys” versus “yinz,” or someone who stresses the vowel sound in the word “aunt” or doesn’t pronounce the “r” in “car” [1]?
What can you tell about someone who addresses a group of people as “you guys” versus “yinz,” or someone who stresses the vowel sound in the word “aunt” or doesn’t pronounce the “r” in “car” [1]?Socially conditioned variation refers to systematic and idiosyncratic shifts in the language used by members of a particular group [2]
Because the design of Study 3a exactly mirrors the design in Study 1, we can directly compare these effect sizes: In Study 3a, which controls for word sense, we find a substantially smaller effect size than in Study 1
Summary
What can you tell about someone who addresses a group of people as “you guys” versus “yinz,” or someone who stresses the vowel sound in the word “aunt” or doesn’t pronounce the “r” in “car” [1]?. Conditioned variation refers to systematic and idiosyncratic shifts in the language used by members of a particular group [2]. Speech patterns that exhibit socially conditioned variation can be used to identify members of a group [3,4,5,6,7]. While language is a vehicle for explicitly-constructed semantic content, structural and systematic variation in language conveys information about a speaker’s environment and past experiences. Do listeners take advantage of this variation as a source of social information? Do listeners take advantage of this variation as a source of social information? Can we learn—without being explicitly taught—to associate glottal stops with younger speakers [8], longer words with male speakers [6, 10], and the phrase “yinz” with Pittsburghers [11]? Recovery of statistically regular patterns is an important part of language acquisition [12,13,14], suggesting that such learning may be possible.
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