Programma

Andries Coetzee heeft helaas om persoonlijke redenen moeten afzeggen voor het congres.

Indexical decision: Exploring experimental approaches to social and lexical meaning

Nicolai Pharao, University of Copenhagen

Variation in speech production is perceived and given meaning by interlocutors. This is a central tenet of contemporary sociolinguistics where steadily increasing amounts of studies within the third wave examine socially meaningful variation in interaction. Within this approach, a strand of speaker perception studies using experimental approaches have been conducted to elucidate the relationship between different types of phonetic variation in running speech and how co-occurrence impacts social meaning. In this talk, I will attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of the processes of socially meaningful listening while also pointing to issues that require further work, and where experimental approaches may prove useful. One such area is the relationship between the processing of social and lexical meaning as listeners encounter variation in the phonetic signal. Drawing on data collected for a dialect of Danish where participants were given both a Personalised Implicit Association Task and a Lexical Decision task, I want to explore how sociophonetic and psycholinguistic methods may be combined to further understand the interrelationship of social and lexical meaning in speech. 

Contextualising language attitudes experiments: a quest beyond reach or a journey worth taking?
Laura Rosseel, VUB Brussel

Context is a crucial factor in the study of the perception and production of language variation. Linguistic variation emerges from situated experience and is hence shaped by linguistic, discourse-related, and social context. While this is widely acknowledged in work theorizing the social evaluation of language variation (see for example Preston 2010, Eckert 2008), it is quite another matter practically integrating these insights on contextualisation of language into experimental studies (cf. critical perspectives in for instance Preston 1989). Over the years, language attitudes researchers have tried various approaches to reconcile the contextualised nature of language variation with the experimental toolbox they dispose of. In this talk, I discuss this quest for more contextualised language attitudes experiments building on our work on the social evaluation of language variation in Belgian Dutch, illustrating how the inclusion of contextual information has led to new insights. At the same time, I try to point to challenges we still face and reflect on ways forward to fully leverage the potential of more contextualised experimental work in language attitudes research and beyond.