“Sounds like home”: The effect of listener on matching guise in regional accent on syntactic acceptability

Abstract

This study unites sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by matching or mismatching social expectations of participants during a syntactic grammaticality judgement task. I hypothesize that regional syntactic structures are more acceptable when heard in their corresponding local, regional accent compared to a nonlocal accent. The experiment focuses on Southern American English as spoken in western Kentucky as the local accent and personal datives and double modals as matching, regional grammatical structures, along with a set of nonlocal filler sentences. 81 University of Kentucky participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey. Regional structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. Self-identified Kentuckian Participants rated local structures higher than non-Kentuckian participants, regardless of which accent they heard. This is prominent in ratings of the nonlocal audio; Kentuckian participants rated both local structures in the nonlocal accent approximately fifteen points higher than non-Kentuckians. In contrast, non-Kentuckian participants mark filler sentences in the local audio lower than the nonlocal, a variation absent from Kentuckian participants’ ratings. These results suggest that grammaticality judgements result from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with the phonological and syntactic structure of an utterance. Judgement of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation.