Abstract for William Labov's talk

Properties of the Sociolinguistic Monitor
William Labov (University of Pennsylvania)
March 20, 2008 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room C198, The CUNY Graduate Center

Studies of speech communities have shown that sociolinguistic variables display a fine-grained social and stylistic stratification in production. A recent series of experiments examined the perceptual aspect of this variation. The experiments were designed to explore the sensitivity and temporal window of the monitoring faculty. The variable (ING), representing the alternation of morphemes with apical and velar nasals, was selected as one of the most stable and well recognized variables of this type. Listeners heard a series of trials by a speaker auditioning for a job as a broadcast announcer, in which the frequency of the /in/ variant ranged from 0 to 100%, and were asked to assign a rating on a scale of job suitability. Judges in Philadelphia displayed a close fit to a logarithmic function in responses to this task, in which the impact of a given deviation from the norm was equivalent to the proportional increase in deviations. The same function appeared in responses of college student judges in Columbia, South Carolina and Durham, New Hampshire, for local and non-local speakers.  However, judges of high school age showed only a linear response at a lower level of precision, varying according to social class.  Among college students, age was also relevant.  Above the age of 23, all judges showed the logarithmic function at a high level of precision. College students from 18 to 23 displayed a bimodal distribution, evenly divided into those who responded with the logarithmic function and those with little sensitivity to the variable.  Such sensitivity to frequencies represents an aspect of sociolinguistic maturation much later in the lifespan than any so far discovered.