SOCIOPHONETIC APPLICATIONS OF SPEECH PERCEPTION EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

�Although studies of perception are still largely assigned to the realms of experimental phonetics or psychology, sociolinguists have been recognizing the importance of perception. Several lines of experimental inquiry have emerged. Nevertheless, perception has been studied far less by sociolinguists than has speech production. One reason is that speech perception is daunting at first. Examining it requires careful attention to experimental design, a considerable amount of preparation, and, in many cases, use of a speech synthesizer. Even so, research on perception can be highly productive. This paper attempts to review the sorts of experiments that have been conducted in the past and to provide guidelines for sociolinguists interested in studying perception, with suggestions for future work. Although perception has been a neglected stepsister of production in sociolinguistics, it, like Cinderella, may have its day soon. Two important factors could—and should—move perception to the forefront of sociophonetic research. One is simply the huge potential for sociolinguistic perception studies because the area has been neglected for so long. The other reason is a more practical one: although perception experiments require extreme attention to detail in the preparation phase, data analysis is generally less time-consuming than in production studies, and this difference may make it more attractive to researchers. The aversion of much of sociolinguistics to perception has been, to some extent, more apparent than real. Many sociolinguistic studies over the past generation, especially instrumental studies, have succeeded in divorcing speech production from speech perception. However, perception issues may play a hidden role in studies that ostensibly address production. The reason is that variationists have not always carefully distinguished production from perception. This tendency is an artifact of the reliance of sociolinguistics on impressionistic transcription. The impressionistic tradition, based on the development of the International Phonetic Alphabet and of the Cardinal Vowel system of Daniel Jones, dominated dialect