Comparing social meanings across listener and speaker groups: The indexical field of Spanish /s/

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Recent research has suggested that the contribution of individual sociolinguistic variables to the social perception of a speaker is influenced by other available information about the speaker (Campbell-Kibler, 2007; Pharao, Maegaard, Spindler Møller, & Kristiansen, 2014). Here we investigate the impact of listener awareness of regional sociolinguistic variation on sociolinguistic perception. Specifically, we compare how the social meanings attributed to word-internal, preconsonantal /s/ differ based on whether the listeners and speakers use predominantly /s/-weakening Puerto Rican Spanish or predominantly non–/s/-weakening Mexican Spanish. We find that for measures of status, Puerto Rican and Mexican listeners both show a smaller effect of /s/ when rating Puerto Rican as opposed to Mexican speakers. However, we see no effect of speaker nationality on heteronormativity, and Puerto Rican listeners and male Mexican listeners rate strong /s/ as less heteronormative across the board. Mexican female listeners, however, rate strong /s/ as more heteronormative. These results suggest that listeners integrate their own local ideologies with their understanding of regional differences when socially evaluating language variation.

This publication has 38 references indexed in Scilit: