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Dynamic Sociolinguistic Processing: Real-Time Changes in Judgments of Speaker Competence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Erez Levon*
Affiliation:
University of Bern
Devyani Sharma*
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
Yang Ye*
Affiliation:
University of Greenwich
*
Center for the Study of Language and Society, Muesmattstrasse 45, 3012 Bern, Switzerland, [erez.levon@unibe.ch]

Abstract

Social category information plays a central role in speech perception and processing. To date, research on this topic has struggled to model how social category perceptions evolve over the time course of an interaction. In this article, we build on recent methodological developments to investigate trajectories of listener perceptions, focusing on how impressions change as linguistic, social, and contextual details emerge. We base our arguments on an analysis of listeners' real-time evaluations of the perceived competence of speakers of two British regional accents during a mock interview for a job in a law firm. Results indicate a need to move away from the view, predominant in sociolinguistics, of category perception as a discrete phenomenon and toward a model of perception as inference under uncertainty. We discuss implications for theories of sociolinguistic cognition and for understandings of accent bias.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Linguistic Society of America

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