Learning linguistic diversity: Listeners have race-based linguistic expectations, but only for phonological variation.

Abstract

In three artificial language experiments, we explored the rate at which adults learned associations between linguistic variation and speaker characteristics. Within each of the experiments, we observed that listeners sociolinguistic learning occurred, regardless of whether the speaker characteristic is social (race and sex/gender) or nonsocial (hat wearing), or whether they heard a phonological or morphological variant. However, we found that listener's initial expectations of what social properties were predictive of linguistic variation differed, impacting overall performance. First, participants were much more likely to assume that a phonological variant was predicted by a social property than a nonsocial property (Experiment 1). Most interestingly, participants were more likely to privilege speaker race than sex/gender, but only in the case of a phonological variant (Experiments 2 and 3). The same effect was found in both White and Black participants, though White participants were more likely to correctly articulate which speaker characteristic explained the variation, suggesting that sociolinguistic learning hinges on real-world experiences with language and social diversity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).