Abstract
In Berlin, the pronunciation of /ç/ as [ɕ] is associated with the multi-ethnic youth variety (Kiezdeutsch). This alternation is also known to be produced by French learners of German. While listeners form socio-cultural interpretations upon hearing language input, the associations differ depending on the listeners’ biases and stereotypes toward speakers or groups. Here, the contrast of interest concerns two speaker groups using the [ç]–[ɕ] alternation: multi-ethnic adolescents from Berlin neighborhoods carrying low social prestige in mainstream German society and French learners of German supposedly having higher cultural prestige. To understand the strength of associations between phonetic alternations and social attributes, we ran an Implicit Association Task with 131 participants (three groups varying in age and ethnic background (mono- vs. multi-ethnic German) using auditory and written stimuli. In experiment 1, participants categorized written words as having a positive (good) or negative (bad) valence and auditory stimuli containing pronunciation variations of /ç/ as canonical [ç] (labeled Hochdeutsch [a term used in Germany for Standard German]) or non-canonical [ɕ] (labeled Kiezdeutsch). In experiment 2, identical auditory stimuli were used but the label Kiezdeutsch was changed to French Accent. Results show faster reaction times when negative categories and non-canonical pronunciations or positive categories and canonical pronunciations were mapped to the same response key, indicating a tight association between value judgments and concept categories. Older German listeners (OMO) match a supposed Kiezdeutsch accent more readily with negatively connotated words compared to a supposed French accent, while younger German listeners (YMO) seem to be indifferent toward this variation. Young multi-ethnic listeners (YMU), however, seem to associate negative concepts more strongly with a supposed French accent compared to Kiezdeutsch. These results demonstrate how social and cultural contextualization influences language interpretation and evaluation. We interpret our findings as a loss of cultural prestige of French speakers for the YMO group compared to the OMO group: younger urban listeners do not react differently to these contextual primes. YMU listeners, however, show a positive bias toward their in-group. Our results point to implicit listener attitudes, beliefs, stereotypes and shared world knowledge as significant factors in culturally- and socially situated language processing.
Highlights
In this study, we will show that listeners draw implicit associations between sub-phonemic variation or fine phonetic detail and evaluative categories in dependence to a speaker group that supposedly produced the speech form
This time, in addition to the main effect of test order, a significant interaction between listener group and condition was found as suggested by hypothesis 2
Our results indicate that the experimental paradigm was successfully deployed to show that the implicit attitudes of the three different hearer groups differ and, that the two different contexts elicited differences in implicit associations
Summary
We will show that listeners draw implicit associations between sub-phonemic variation or fine phonetic detail and evaluative categories in dependence to a speaker group that supposedly produced the speech form. Speech production is not merely a means of transporting propositional content, and serves the construction of personas and reflects speakers’ social identities. We conceive speech with all its features and variants as a tool set from which speakers (sub)consciously select and chose from to position themselves in social space. Many of the fine phonetic details observed in speech are produced by a speaker without much awareness. Hearers may be in a position to draw meaningful associations between linguistic variants and social actors that use variants to create a personal style or to index a particular social persona, properties or stances. A speaker’s perceived femininity or masculinity plays a role in perception (Johnson et al, 1999) as does a hearer’s age (Jannedy and Weirich, 2014) or where the hearer believes the speaker is from Niedzielski (1999), Hay and Drager (2010), Jannedy and Weirich (2014)
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