Attention To People Like You: A Proposal Regarding Neuroendocrine Effects on Linguistic Variation

Abstract

Although the literature on language change has often replicated and discussed a pattern inwhich female speakers lead in changes that occur below the level of awareness, there is noconsensus on why this pattern should arise. Two major suggestions have been put forward.On the one hand, Labov (1990) has proposed that a possible explanation may be due tocaregiver asymmetries during childhood, with women being frequently the primarycaregivers in the relevant communities. On the other hand, Eckert (2011) has suggested thatwomen are more likely to engage in ‘social engineering’ and symbolic domination than men,due to the setup of the gender roles in their communities, which makes them more likely to belinguistic innovators. Interestingly, recent findings in endocrinology show that differences inprenatal testosterone exposure can impact learning patterns. In the light of these findings, wefirst present preliminary results consistent with the hypothesis that a biological factor,prenatal exposure to androgens, can have a continuous effect on linguistic variation, namelythe variable duration of preaspiration before voiceless obstruents in Tyneside English. This isin line with findings related to f 0 reported by Ferdezi et al. (2011). Second, we propose anexplanatory model in which the biological factor – prenatal testosterone exposure – createssubtle bias in how speakers learn linguistic variants, and suggest that some reported sexeffects are derivative. This model is compatible with the fact that it is most often females wholead in language change from below, but can also account for situations in which males mightlead a change (Labov 1990: 206).