Limited attention shifts judgments in socioindexical perception

Abstract

This project investigated how limited attention influences the perception of socially meaningful details in speech with a focus on American English ING. American English ING has two variants, a canonically standard velar variant -ing, as in cooking, and a non-standard apical variant -in’, as in cookin’. Talkers who more frequently use the apical variant are judged to be less educated, less articulate, less formal, and more likely to be Southern. In a matched guise task talkers produced apical variants, velar variants, or a mix of the two. Participants rated the talkers on intelligence, clarity, dynamism, friendliness, and gender. In a distracted condition, participants completed visual search tasks while listening to limit their ability to attend to the talkers’ speech. In a focused condition, participants listened with no concurrent task. The results revealed that apical talkers were rated as less cold and less articulate than velar talkers. Ratings for coldness, but not articulateness, were less affected by ING guise for distracted participants than focused participants. Additionally, ratings for articulateness and gender shifted between distracted and focused conditions independent of ING guise. These findings suggest that limited attention alters how listeners form judgments from indexical information in speech.