The term sociophonetics has experienced a steady growth in its use over the past few decades. According to Foulkes and Docherty (2006), it was apparently coined by Deschaies-Lafontaine (1974). During the 1970s and 1980s it was used primarily as an occasional title for sessions at phonetics conferences, encompassing studies that examined some sort of dialectal difference in a phonetic property. During the 1990s, however, its usage grew, particularly after sociolinguists began using it for studies of linguistic variation that utilized modern phonetic analyses – i.e., acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual investigations. The term is now commonplace. There are currently two textbooks on it (Di Paolo and Yaeger-Dror 2011; Thomas 2011) and at least two collections of studies (Preston and Niedzielski 2010; Celata and Calamai 2014) with sociophonetics in the title, as well as a special issue of the Journal of Phonetics in 2006 and one of Lingua in 2012 dedicated to it. A number of articles (Hay and Drager 2007; Thomas 2007, 2013; Foulkes, Scobbie, and Watt 2010) have reviewed it. The International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) regularly holds multiple sessions devoted to it, and the annual conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) has held a workshop on it for several years running. Clearly, sociophonetics has become an essential component of contemporary linguistics.
What, however, is sociophonetics besides a nebulous area in which phonetics and linguistic variation overlap? Phoneticians have tended to apply the term to descriptive studies on dialectal variation in any phonetic property. This descriptive focus can be seen in early papers from the Journal of Phonetics (e.g., Caramazza and Yeni-Komshian 1974; Kvavik 1974) and the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (e.g., Nally 1971; Johnson 1971). The descriptive focus is still seen in recent papers in the latter journal (e.g., Wikström 2013; Kirtley et al. 2016), as well as in a large fraction of presentations in sessions at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences with “sociophonetics” in their title (see the ICPhS archive at www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/icphs). There have been ample exceptions, such as Szakay and Torgersen’s (2015) study of gender/ethnicity interaction and Nguyen et al.’s (2015) perception experiment linking affective attitudes toward an ethnic group with accuracy in speech recognition. Conspicuously absent from studies by phoneticians that have been labeled as sociophonetics, however, are papers addressing such historically important phonetic issues as quantal theory, motor theory, locus equation theory, and invariance.
Studies by sociolinguists that fall within the ambit of sociophonetics have their descriptive tradition as well (e.g., Thomas 2001). However, most have some other goal. Much of William Labov’s work with vowels (e.g., Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner 1972; Labov 1991, 1994, 2001) has aimed to determine general tendencies in how vowels shift diachronically. The mechanisms behind phonological mergers have been another key focus (e.g., Labov, Karan, and Miller 1991; Rae and Warren 2002; Johnson 2010). Another crucial issue has been language contact (e.g., Purnell, Salmons, and Tepeli 2005a, 2005b; Kerswill, Torgersen, and Fox 2008; Sharbawi and Deterding 2010; Queen 2012). A key aim has been to determine the social meaning – the second-order indexicality – of particular variants; that is, how people use phonetic forms to signal or interpret identity for a community or smaller networks of people (indexicality being the identification by a word of some quality of its referent or speaker). Two studies of how vowel variants signify opposing social groups in high schools – Habick’s (1980) investigation of a rural Illinois school and Fought’s (1999) study of a mostly Latino school in Los Angeles – exemplify this focus.
A third source of input to sociophonetics, one that largely involves perception experiments, has roots in social psychology. This tradition extends back at least to Mason’s (1946) experiment on identification of dialects by military personnel. A watershed moment came when Lambert et al. (1960) introduced the matched guise experiment, which in that study involved having listeners respond to recordings of the same speakers using French in one excerpt and English in another. Subjects rated the same voices more highly on various aptitude scales when the person was speaking English than when the individual was speaking French. Another innovation came when Brown, Strong, and Rencher (1972) introduced speech synthesis to subjective reaction experimentation. Sociolinguists eventually adopted the methods – e.g., in Frazer’s (1987) and van Bezooijen’s (1988) use of excerpts of different dialects to elicit subjective reactions – and they applied them to various other problems as well.
At this point, one might ask whether sociophonetics has a true focus. While many, though not all, phoneticians have confined sociophonetic to descriptive studies of individual features, sociolinguists have enthusiastically applied it to studies of issues such as the use of linguistic variants for projecting identity, the mechanisms of sound change, and the relationship between language and societal inequality. The remaining sections will illustrate the diversity of studies that fall under the label sociophonetic and then suggest that there is more to sociophonetics than merely the interface of phonetics and sociolinguistics: in fact, studies of phonetic variation can shed light on some of the most basic questions in linguistics. These questions include the nature of sound change and the nature of cognition of language. For the latter, sociophonetic investigations are vital for dissecting problems such as the relationship between structural and metalinguistic aspects of language and between abstract and episodic representations of linguistic cognition.
Perhaps the most robust enterprise in sociophonetics has been inquiry into vowel shifting. This line of research, which relies on acoustic analysis of vowel formant frequencies, began with Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner (1972), who analyzed vowel configurations in various dialects of English, mostly in the United States. Formant analysis revealed sound shifts that previous auditory analyses had largely or entirely overlooked. The primary aim was to identify principles governing how vowels shifted, and the principles they proposed continued to appear, with small modifications, in Labov’s later work (especially Labov 1991, 1994, 2001). For example, they proposed that long or tense vowels tend to rise along the periphery of the vowel envelope (i.e., the plotted F1/F2 space occupied by vowels) and that short or lax vowels tend to fall in the interior of the vowel envelope. Labov and his students exploited the methods for various sociolinguistic studies (e.g., Hindle 1980; Labov 1980; Veatch 1991), and, until the 1990s, they conducted nearly all of the sociophonetic work on vowels.
Another issue besides principles of vowel shifting that acoustic studies have explored is the geographical extent of vocalic variants and their diffusion. The largest-scale studies have been most successful. Labov et al. (2006) was able to demarcate the extent of nearly every known vowel shift in North American English and to delineate boundaries of dialects, which for the most part matched those of older studies. It also turned up some previously unknown shifts. Another recent large-scale project is SweDia (Eriksson 2004), a survey of regional variation in Swedish in which balanced samples of older and younger and male and female speakers were interviewed across the Swedish-speaking area. Leinonen (2010) conducted an analysis of vocalic variation in SweDia using a novel acoustic analysis involving sampling intensity at multiple frequencies, followed by three layers of statistical analysis. She determined that some dialect leveling was occurring within regions and change was occurring most rapidly in the region around Stockholm, but no sharp dialectal boundaries emerged.
Numerous smaller-scale acoustic vowel studies have appeared in recent decades, with a variety of aims. Some have examined the configuration of all the vowels or those involved in vowel rotation patterns in specific communities, usually correlating them with sex or social networks and/or tracking change across generations (e.g., Ito and Preston 1998; Fridland 2001; Baranowski 2007; Durian 2012; Labov, Rosenfelder, and Fruehwald 2013). Others have focused on allophony or splits of individual vowels (e.g., Zeller 1997; Boberg and Strassel 2000, Ash 2002; Blake and Josey 2003; Moreton and Thomas 2007; Fruehwald 2016). A few (e.g., Evanini 2008; Thomas 2010) have explored how geographical dialect boundaries change over time. There are also descriptive studies intended to provide phoneticians with information about dialectal variation (Hagiwara 1997; Clopper, Pisoni, and de Jong 2005). Another important sociophonetic application of vowel analysis has been to ethnic variation. Studies of African American English (AAE) have shed light on the traditional controversies surrounding AAE: how it originated (Thomas and Bailey 1998), its ongoing relationship with white vernaculars (e.g., Wolfram and Thomas 2002; Fridland 2003a, 2003b; Fridland and Bartlett 2006; Labov 2014), and its degree of geographical and other internal variation (e.g., Deser 1990; Yaeger-Dror and Thomas 2010; Kohn 2013). Vowel formant analysis for other ethnic groups has largely concerned language contact and its aftereffects. Studies of Latino English in the United States have yielded descriptive studies (e.g., Godinez 1984; Godinez and Maddieson 1985; Thomas 2001), studies of accommodation to matrix speech when the community social ecology allows it (e.g., Ocumpaugh 2010; Roeder 2010), and studies of how social identity leads to Latino (sub)dialects (Fought 1999; Thomas 2019). Other language contact situations in which vowels have been studied instrumentally include immigrant communities in London (Evans, Mistry, and Moreiras 2007; Kerswill, Torgerson, and Fox 2008) and the Chinese American community of San Francisco (Hall-Lew 2009).
Vocalic mergers have been the subject of considerable sociophonetic research. In English, the merger of the /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ vowels, making pairs such as cot/caught and hock/hawk homophonous, has generated numerous papers (e.g., Irons 2007; Johnson 2010; Benson, Fox, and Balkman 2011). Other authors, however, have reported that the contrast may be maintained subtly in some regions (Di Paolo 1992; Fridland, Kendall, and Farrington 2014), the former study reporting phonation differences and the latter durational differences, and Di Paolo and Faber (1990) found that phonation can maintain distinctions between certain classes of pre-/l/ vowels as well. Elsewhere, other mergers, such as the fear/fair merger in New Zealand English (Hay et al. 2006) and the merger of long and short vowels in Seoul Korean (Kang, Yoon, and Han 2015) have been examined. For formant values, measures of overlap such as Pillai scores (Hay, Nolan, and Drager 2006) and Bhattacharyya’s affinity (Johnson 2015) have been useful. Nevertheless, overlap measures can fail to register a distinction if the distinction is maintained by factors such as duration, dynamics, or phonation instead of by static formant values. They can also imply that a nonexistent distinction is present if mismatched segmental or prosodic contexts in the tokens that are measured create a spurious differentiation in the formant values.
Recent methodological innovations have expanded vocalic studies in new directions. One innovation has been the examination of vowel trajectories, for which readings are taken at multiple time points through a vowel instead of just one or two points. Various studies (e.g., Fox and Jacewicz 2009; Jacewicz, Fox, and Salmons 2011; Jacewicz and Fox 2012; Leinonen 2010; Hoffman 2011; Kirtley et al. 2016) have used this technique profitably for the notoriously dynamic English vowels. Another innovation is the use of automatic formant extraction routines, which permit the collection of large amounts of data quickly (see, e.g., Labov, Rosenfelder and Fruehwald 2013; Reddy and Stanford 2015; Fruehwald 2016). One potentially game-changing development is the advent of ultrasound for examining tongue configuration. This innovation has so far barely infiltrated vocalic variation studies (see Bauer and Parker 2008; De Decker and Nycz 2012; Mielke, Carignan, and Thomas 2017). Its impact has been stronger for consonantal studies.
The North American bias of the vocalic research should be obvious. Varieties of English outside North America have received much less sociophonetic work on their vowels: see Cox (1999) on Australian English; Torgersen and Kerswill (2004) and Baranowski (2017) on England English; McClure (1995) and Schützler (2011) on Scottish English; Maclagan (1982) and Maclagan and Hay (2007) on New Zealand English. Vowels of “New Englishes” in Asia and Africa have also been analyzed acoustically, largely for descriptive purposes (Deterding 2003, 2005; Deterding, Wong, and Kirkpatrick 2008; Sarmah, Gogoi, and Wiltshire 2009; Tan and Low 2010; Hoffman 2011). Outside of English, acoustic analysis of vowel variation has remained quite limited. There have been a few studies tracing regional variation and change in Dutch (van Heuven, Edelman, and van Bezooijen 2002; Adank et al. 2007; Van der Harst, Van de Velde, and Van Hout 2014), but aside from work on SweDia described earlier, very few on other languages (e.g., Willis 2007b, 2008 for Spanish, Moosmüller and Granser 2006 for Albanian; Liu and Liang 2016 for Xinyang Mandarin; and Schoormann, Heeringa, and Peters 2017 for Saterland Frisian).
Sociophonetic analysis of consonantal variation, though not as extensive as that of vowels, has been active. Approximants have garnered considerable attention. Among laterals, most research has examined “dark /l/,” the velarization of alveolar laterals. Studies have examined this development in Catalan (Recasens and Espinosa 2005), British English (Carter and Local 2007), Spanish-influenced forms of American English (Van Hofwegen 2009; Newman 2010), and, with ultrasound technology, dialects of British English (Turton 2014). Another variable is the vocalization of /l/, examined acoustically in American English by Dodsworth and Hazen (2012).
Rhotics have provided more fodder for sociophonetic work than laterals. In English and Dutch, an important issue is whether /r/ is produced with a retroflex or a “bunched” articulation. Both involve two constrictions, one of which is pharyngeal, but the other constriction is retro-apical for the retroflex form and dorso-palatal for the “bunched” one. Because the two forms sound almost identical, ultrasound has become the preferred analysis method. Mielke, Baker, and Archangeli (2010) discussed contextual constraints of the variants, also finding the “bunched” form more common, in American English. Scobbie and Sebregts (2011) and Sebregts (2014) showed that both forms occur in Netherlandic Dutch, mainly in syllable codas. Work in Scotland, including ultrasound analyses of Edinburgh speech (Lawson, Scobbie, and Stuart-Smith 2011, 2013) and acoustic analyses of Glasgow speech (Stuart-Smith 2007) have revealed a class-based schism in which middle-class speakers prefer “bunched” /r/, whereas working-class speakers tend toward apical realizations that can undergo weakening or elision. The uvularization of /r/ that is widespread in European languages has been investigated extensively by auditory means, but the main instrumental studies are those by Scobbie and Sebregts (2011) and Sebregts (2014) on Dutch. They found uvular forms to be widespread, especially in syllable onsets, but more common in some locales than others.
Another widespread process affecting rhotics is assibilation. In Spanish, both trilled and tapped rhotics, which contrast only intervocalically, may become a fricative such as [ʐ] or may be reduced to aspiration, depending on dialect. Studies have used acoustic analysis to demonstrate dialect-specific assibilation of intervocalic trills (Willis and Bradley 2008; Henriksen and Willis 2010) and word-initial rhotics (Colantoni 2006). Willis (2007a) documented the presence in Dominican Spanish of breathiness preceding medial rhotics, sometimes with loss of the lingual maneuver, leaving only voiced aspiration. Rafat (2010) examined rhotics in Farsi acoustically and noted a strong tendency toward assibilation in some contexts, especially for female subjects.
Fricatives have generally been analyzed using either spectral center of gravity (COG) or the frequency of the highest-amplitude spectral peak. Weakening of /s/ to [h] or deletion has been analyzed using COG for Dominican (Erker 2010) and Columbian (File-Muriel and Brown 2011) Spanish. [s] normally exhibits considerable energy in the 4–10 kHz range and drastic changes in COG can signify non-sibilant realizations. Another Spanish variable, fortition of /j/ to [ʒ~ʃ], was analyzed by Colantoni (2006) in two Argentinian dialects. In English, variation in [s] variants, such as laminal and apical forms, has been explored (e.g., Stuart-Smith 2007; Podesva and Van Hofwegen 2016; Zamman 2017) as a marker of social identity. Another English variable is the retraction of [s] in /str/ clusters toward [ʃ] (e.g., Rutter 2011; Baker, Archangeli, and Mielke 2011). The preceding two shifts are identifiable from a moderate lowering of COG values.
Several stop variables have been examined instrumentally. Although place of articulation has been coded auditorily in most variation studies, Purnell (2008) used x-ray data to show that /ɡ/ had a fronter articulation than /k/ in Wisconsin English, and ultrasound holds promise for further work on any number of place variables. Wisconsin English furnished another key variable involving the cues used to signal the voicing distinction for Purnell, Salmons, and Tepeli (2005a, 2005b). These studies showed that the shift of German Americans from German, in which voicing is neutralized word-finally, to English led to an unusual situation in which vowels were longer before voiceless stops than before voiced stops. This configuration was compensated for by exaggeration of the duration distinction for voiced and voiceless occlusions.
A different sort of stop variable, pre-aspiration, in which vowels become breathy or voiceless before a voiceless stop, occurs in some northwestern European languages. Lectal variation in the amount of pre-aspiration, both geographical and by gender, has been examined for Swedish (Wretling, Strangert, and Schaeffler 2002, using SweDia data; Stölten and Engstrand 2002; Tronnier 2002) and Welsh English (Hejna 2015). The mere presence of pre-aspiration sets Newcastle upon Tyne apart from other parts of England (Docherty and Foulkes 1999; Foulkes and Docherty 2006).
Other stop variables include glottalization and voice-onset time (VOT). Glottalization, common in British English dialects, involves replacement of medial /t/ with [ʔ]. Though it is usually evaluated auditorily, Docherty and Foulkes (1999) and Foulkes and Docherty (2006) have shown that it occurs in multiple forms, including glottal reinforcement of [t], [ʔ] without coronal occlusion, and a period of creakiness between vowels. Some studies, e.g., Straw and Patrick’s (2007) examination of ethnic differences in London, have incorporated inspection of spectrograms into coding of glottalization. VOT is often analyzed when dialects emerge from language contact situations, e.g., Punjabi/English by Heselwood and McChrystal (1999), Māori/English by Maclagan et al. (2009), and Yucatec Mayan/Spanish by Michnowicz and Carpenter (2013). In such cases, the stop series of the languages in contact do not coincide in VOT properties. However, there are studies of VOT variation in non-contact situations (e.g., Japanese in Takada and Tomimori 2006; Scots in Scobbie 2006). An unusual case is Korean, in which a VOT distinction between two stop series is being replaced with a tonal distinction (e.g., Choi 2002).
Epenthetic stops, as occur between the /n/ and /s/ in dense, are the subject of Fourakis and Port (1986). The finding that dialects differed in whether they had the stops, even while the epenthetic stops averaged shorter than underlying stops as in dents, defied traditional notions about the respective realms of phonology and phonetics. It was an important demonstration of how language variation can provide insights into the cognitive organization of speech.
A few studies have investigated lenition or loss of stops. Syrika, Kong, and Edwards (2011) analyzed the softening of Greek /k/ before front vowels from [kj] to [tɕ~tʃ] in certain dialects. Two cases involving language contact are Mansfield (2015), who showed how a speaker’s linguistic background affected the degree to which the speaker elided initial stops in the indigenous Australian language Murrinh Patha, and Sadowski and Aninao (2019), who analyzed various lenition products of /p/ in Mapudungan-influenced Chilean Spanish.
Although sociophoneticians have focused on these previously mentioned variables, those processes certainly do not exhaust the consonantal possibilities. For example, Rohena-Madrazo (2015) analyzed vocal pulsing to show that Argentine Spanish /j/, as in ya “already,” which is well-known to have shifted earlier to [ʒ~ʝ], is now undergoing devoicing to [ʃ]. Other such studies will undoubtedly materialize in the future. In addition, the automatic extraction routines that increasingly have been used for vowel measurement are now becoming applicable to analysis of some consonantal properties as well (e.g., Baranowski and Turton, forthcoming).
Prosody has attracted far less attention from sociophoneticians than segmental properties, though intonation is accumulating a sizable sociophonetic literature. Prosodic rhythm has garnered a moderate amount of work. Rate of speech and lexical tone lag far behind.
Prosodic rhythm is thought of as consisting of a grade from syllable-timing to stress-timing; in syllable-timing, syllables (or the vowels within them) are supposed to have approximately the same durations, whereas in stress-timing, rhythmic feet have roughly equal durations but syllables may differ widely. Although the notion of strict isochrony in “syllable-timed” languages has been disproved (e.g., Wenk and Wiolland 1982) and numerous questions remain about whether prosodic rhythm is a feature in its own right or merely an artifact of other processes and about the best method of measuring it (Turk and Shattuck-Hufnagel 2013), a small body of work has addressed how it is manifested as a sociolinguistic variable. Most of these studies involve language contact situations or sites of former language contact. Furthermore, even though prosodic rhythm has been applied to numerous languages, most studies that examine intra-language variation in it have focused on English. In all cases, heritage English speakers have proved to exhibit relatively stress-timed speech compared to speakers of “New Englishes,” in some cases even after the group that shifted to English had become English-dominant. Cases examined include Singapore English, with Malay and Chinese substrates (Low, Grabe, and Nolan 2000; Deterding 2001), Latino English (Carter 2005), Welsh English (White and Mattys 2007), Cherokee English (Coggshall 2008), Māori English (Szakay 2008), Thai English (Sarmah, Gogoi, and Wiltshire 2009), and Multicultural London English (Torgerson and Szakay 2012). In fact, rhythm that is less stress-timed than heritage English has even been attributed to substrate effects from languages that were abandoned long ago in the cases of Shetland and Orkney English (White and Mattys 2007) and earlier African American English (Thomas and Carter 2006). Dialectal variation in rhythm that is not explicable from substrate influences has been found for Bristol English compared to standard British English (White and Mattys 2007) and across US regions (Clopper and Smiljanic 2015), but far more variation of that type undoubtedly exists and awaits investigation. Three exceptions to the English focus are Frota and Vigário (2001), who found some rhythmic differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese; Gazali, Hamdi, and Barkat (2002), who noted some differences across Arabic; and O’Rourke (2008), who compared prosodic rhythm of Spanish monolinguals and Quichua/Spanish bilinguals in Peru.
Contemporary intonation analyses are necessarily acoustic because they involve reference to f0 tracks. A great deal of dialectal description of intonational variation consists of this sort of analysis, in which the analyst performs a combination of reading f0 tracks and making auditory judgments. In contrast to vocalic and rhythmic studies, languages besides English have dominated these analyses. For example, studies have covered various national varieties of Spanish, as well as contact situations involving Spanish (see O’Rourke 2014 for a review). Examples of comparative dialectal studies of additional languages are Dalton and Ní Chasaide (2003) for Irish, Grabe (2004) for English, and Grice et al. (2005) for Italian. In English, the most heavily studied feature has been the “high rising terminal” (HRT), popularly called “uptalk,” an innovative development in which statements terminate in a rise in f0 instead of a fall (for a review, see Warren 2005). The 2016 Speech Prosody conference (http://sites.bu.edu/speechprosody2016/) had two full sessions on HRT. One exemplary instrumental analysis of HRT is Szakay’s (2008) comparison of white and Māori New Zealanders’ prosody.
Nevertheless, numerous other intonational studies have gone beyond simply interpreting f0 tracks to conducting quantitative analyses of the acoustics. Various kinds of analyses have been used. Some metrics target timing, ordinarily examining f0 peaks and troughs. One of the more commonly used metrics is peak delay, which compares the position of the highest f0 value associated with a pitch accent with some landmark in the host vowel or host syllable, such as the lowest f0 value or the offset of the vowel/syllable. Atterer and Ladd (2004) and Mücke et al. (2009) demonstrated that southern German tends to show later peaks and troughs than northern German. Aufterbeck (2004) and Ladd et al. (2009) each compared a variety of Scottish English to Southern British English (SBE), and both found that peaks averaged later in the Scottish varieties than in SBE when prosodic context was controlled for. Another study, Arvaniti and Garding (2007), showed that the f0 maximum for L*+H pitch accents averages later in California English than in Minnesota English. Other examples of studies examining dialectal variation in the temporal placement of peaks include van Heuven and van Leyden (2003) for Shetland and Orkney English and O’Rourke (2012) for Peruvian Spanish varieties with and without influence from Quechua. Peters, Hanssen, and Gussenhoven (2015) tested a related phenomenon, that of how a peak moves when a nuclear word or foot is lengthened, with speakers from five locations in The Netherlands and one in Germany. They found variation among the dialects, depending on prosodic context, in whether the peak was aligned with the onset or offset of the word/foot or with both.
Intonational metrics can also involve measurements of f0 frequencies of the peak of a pitch accent or edge tone, often converted to ERB units and sometimes examining the pitch excursion – i.e., the difference in Hz or ERB between the peak and a corresponding trough. Some inquiries (e.g., Colantoni and Gurlekian 2004; Willis 2007c; O’Rourke 2014) have shown how excursion patterns of different kinds of utterances define certain dialects of Spanish. Another use of frequency was developed by Grabe et al. (2000), who showed that various English dialects in the British Isles differ in whether they maintain the amount of excursion (compression) or reduce the excursion (truncation) when the duration of a foot is reduced. The shape of a peak – pointed or flat-topped – is an additional factor for which f0 frequency could be assessed (see Niebuhr and Hoekstra 2015).
Most intonation work is descriptive, examining the structure of a dialect or comparing intonational structures across dialects, or is designed to investigate phonetic questions such as how peak placement is affected as metrical feet grow longer. Some, such as Queen (2001, 2006, 2012), Elordieta (2003), Colantoni and Gurlekian (2004), and O’Rourke (2014), tie intonational features of specific dialects to language contact. Few studies have examined how intonation is used for social indexicality. One exception is Podesva (2011), who showed how gay men manipulated the f0 and duration of intonational contours to project different personas.
Because sociophoneticians have predominantly set their sights on Western languages, it is unsurprising that little instrumental work has been conducted on variation in lexical tone. There are a few exceptions. Bauer, Kwan-Hin, and Pak-Man (2003) and Mok, Zuo, and Wong (2013) examined tonal merger in Hong Kong Cantonese, and Zhang (2014) performed comparisons of regional, age group, and stylistic variation in Wu tones. Two studies analyzed threatened languages in southern China, Stanford (2008) on how tone in Sui is affected by dialect contact and Yang, Stanford, and Yang (2015) on a tonal split in Lalo. Nevertheless, most work on tonal variation continues to rely on auditory transcription, and acoustic work on lexical tone is clearly a wide-open field.
Rate of speech has not been explored extensively from the perspective of social variation. Much of the existing literature focuses on differences in overall rate of speech among different groups (e.g., Ray and Zahn 1990; Robb, Maclagan, and Chen 2004; Quené 2008). Kendall (2013), however, offers a demonstration of other methods for approaching it, such as analyzing pause durations, taking conversations apart into different sections, and correlating rate of speech with other variables. Some of these suggestions are incorporated into Clopper and Smiljanic (2015), who found complex interactions between gender and region within the US for rate and duration of pauses. The latter study also reported modest regional differences in articulation rates, with the slowest from Midland and Southern speakers and the fastest from New England and Mid-Atlantic subjects.
Voice quality has rarely been explored in instrumental sociophonetic studies. A few studies have examined differences in overall f0, showing that some groups produce higher or lower average f0 values than others (e.g., Walton and Orlikoff 1994; Szakay and Torgersen 2015). Yuasa (2008) went a step further, showing that Japanese and American men and women employ pitch range differently according to cultural and gender norms for particular pragmatic functions. Yuasa (2010) showed that American women use creaky voicing extensively, whereas Japanese women do not (see also Wolk, Abdelli-Beruh, and Slavin 2011 and a subjective reaction experiment in Anderson et al. 2014). A study of performed speech by entertainers (Moisik 2012) suggested that harsh voice quality is stereotypically associated with African Americans. Soskuthy et al. (2017) suggested a possible connection between changes in voice quality and /r/ production in Glasgow English. Plichta (2002) employed both acoustic and articulatory measures to show that differing levels of nasality characterize a particular vowel in different sections of Michigan, and Ikuta (2013) showed that nasality characterizes the speech of clerks in shops with a young clientele in Japan, but otherwise nasality has attracted little sociophonetic study.
As can be seen in the preceding sections, sociophonetic studies of speech production have been extensive insofar as they have covered virtually every genre of phonetic variable. This research has illuminated both fine details of phonetic structures and structural properties of variation and change in language. A great deal of information has been uncovered on such issues as how phonological contrasts can be maintained, how language transfer can affect sound systems, what kinds of transitional forms occur in particular sound changes, and how broad the span of features for which apparently similar dialects can differ is.
Nevertheless, the indexicality of variants is not always examined, and when it is, it tends to be limited to gross demographic factors, such as geographical dialects, gender, or ethnic groups. Relatively few studies, such as Fought (1999), Lawson, Scobbie, and Stuart-Smith (2011, 2013) and Podesva (2011), have used instrumental techniques to examine the indexicality of forms with networks of people or for projecting one’s identity in various settings. Most sociolinguistic projects that have dealt in depth with the construction of identity (e.g., Mendoza-Denton 2008; Hoffman and Walker 2010; Meyerhoff and Schleef 2012) have not exploited instrumental phonetic techniques to any great extent.
What is needed is inquiry that combines advanced instrumental methods with careful attention to the indexical properties of linguistic variants. Research that successfully amalgamates these two areas will be useful for explaining how sound changes can take on social meanings and then how this metalinguistic information passes through social networks. Moreover, it can also help sociophoneticians to address cognitive aspects of language. Indexicality is often lodged in phonetic subtleties and its extraction requires instrumental analysis (Docherty and Foulkes 1999). The cognitive links between forms and social meaning are essential to language. Exploration of these connections is commonly relegated to perception studies, the topic of the next section, but more attention should be given to them in production studies as well. Greater study of style shifting would be particularly useful in that regard, as would studies of second dialect acquisition (e.g., Nycz 2013) and accommodation (e.g., Pardo et al. 2012).
Speech perception has always played an important role in sociophonetics, even though much of the perception research has had a low profile. The experimental problems addressed have been diverse, which has made socio-perception seem more difficult than production work to summarize in a succinct narrative. Nevertheless, perception experiments, along with functional neural imaging, represent the most direct routes for exploring cognition of language variation.
Certain types of experiments are designed to test whether a listener has two phonological categories merged or distinct. One such design is a commutation experiment, in which listeners are played recordings of words containing the sounds in question, uttered by speakers of their own dialect or other dialects, and are asked to identify each word (see Labov 1994 for examples). Another design, used by Janson and Schulman (1983), involves creation of a synthetic continuum of sounds within a frame representing a word and asking listeners to identify which word they hear for each stimulus. Labov, Karan, and Miller (1991) pointed out a limitation in that design – it depends on conscious knowledge of the language and thus can be affected by factors such as standardization – and created a functional test in which listeners heard a story for which the interpretation hinged on a single word that could contain either of the potentially merged sounds. More recently, some brain scanning work using event-related potentials (ERP) has been conducted on how listeners with and without a phonological merger process the affected sounds (Conrey, Potts, and Niedzielski 2005; Brunelliére et al. 2009).
A similar experimental design is to present listeners with stimuli and to ask them to identify the phone they hear. Earlier examples (Willis 1972; Janson 1983, 1986; Thomas 2000) examined how dialectal differences and ongoing sound change created differences in perceptual boundaries between sounds among different speakers. More recent experiments have shown that these perceptual boundaries can be surprisingly malleable. Rakerd and Plichta (2010) demonstrated that listeners from a dialect in which a vowel shift had occurred adjusted a perceptual boundary according to whether the carrier sentence of a stimulus was spoken in their dialect or not. Evans and Iverson (2004) reported similar shifts for British listeners when they heard different English accents. Other experiments have shown that being told that a speaker is from one dialect or another (Niedzielski 1999) or even seeing items suggestive of one region or another (Hay, Nolan, and Drager 2006; Hay and Drager 2010) can induce listeners to shift their perceptual boundaries. Maye, Aslin, and Tanenhaus (2008) had subjects listen to an artificial dialect and then to identify stimuli, and the results showed that the listeners’ perceptual boundaries had shifted. In contrast, however, Evans and Iverson (2007) found that natives of northern England who had moved to southern England exhibited shifting of their perceptual norms only if their production norms had also shifted.
A third kind of experiment involves having listeners identify characteristics of speakers whose voices they hear in stimuli. One sort of identification task is to have listeners identify each speaker’s dialect. Numerous such experiments have been carried out with American regional dialects (e.g., Preston 1993; Clopper, Levi, and Pisoni 2006; Clopper and Pisoni 2007; Clopper and Bradlow 2009; Baker, Eddington and Nay 2009), but other varieties of English (Bush 1967; van Bezooijen and Gooskens 1999; Williams, Garrett, and Coupland 1999) and Dutch dialects (van Bezooijen and Gooskens 1999) have also been tested. Moreover, dozens of experiments on the distinguishability of European American and African American voices have been conducted; see Thomas and Reaser (2004, 2015) for reviews. These experiments have examined not just whether listeners can identify dialects but also what features they rely on, whether some dialects are more perceptually similar than others, whether more prototypical or stereotypical speakers are easier to identify than others, and whether some listeners are better at identification (usually based on level of exposure) than others. In addition to dialect identification, however, listeners may also be asked to name personal attributes of speakers, such as intelligence, friendliness, or trustworthiness, in a subjective reaction experiment. The matched-guise experiment of Lambert et al. (1960) falls into this category. An extensive review of early subjective reaction experiments appears in Giles and Powesland (1975); see also the review in Thomas (2002). The aim of such experiments is to lay bare the listeners’ stereotypical attitudes or, as in such recent studies as Labov et al. (2011), Levon and Fox (2014), and Bekker and Levon (2017), the social indexicality of variants. Some recent experiments, notably Hay, Warren, and Drager (2006), have gone a step further in showing that listeners cognitively tie forms with specific subgroups within a community. All of these identification experiments target what Kristiansen (2008) terms listeners’ “receptive competence,” their often subconscious association of linguistic forms with groups of speakers and stereotypes about those groups.
Finally, many experiments have tested the intelligibility of particular voices according to their dialect. Some experiments (e.g., Mason 1946; Arahill 1970; van Bezooijen and Gooskens 1999; van Bezooijen and van den Berg 1999), simply test the general intelligibility of different dialects. Nguyen et al. (2015) showed that listeners’ affective attitudes about speakers influenced their accuracy in identifying vowels. Other experiments have introduced timing of responses (e.g., Floccia et al. 2006; Impe, Geeraerts, and Speelman 2008; Adank et al. 2009), finding that dialects have some processing cost for listeners, especially if they are unfamiliar to the listeners, but not as much as foreign accents, and that listeners adapt to the dialects. An ERP study by Goslin, Duffy, and Floccia (2012) also found that regional dialects are processed more quickly and by a different cognitive mechanism than foreign accents. Sumner and Samuel (2009) constructed a prime/target experiment with response timing and corroborated the importance of familiarity, though they also suggested that listeners familiar with a dialect might differ in whether they store only one or both competing forms in memory.
The cognitive perspective afforded by socio-perceptual work has allowed researchers to address more general issues of linguistic representation. Since Johnson (1997) proposed an exemplar model of linguistic processing, in which linguistic forms are stored and accessed as statistically stored memories of heard utterances instead of as abstractions, there has been considerable debate about episodic vs. abstract models of language. The feature of episodic models that makes them attractive for sociolinguists, as Foulkes and Docherty (2006) argued, is that memories of the context and speaker are retained along with the linguistic form, and all of this information is cognitively linked together. Thus, the indexicality of social information becomes firmly rooted within one’s linguistic competence. Since then, “hybrid models” that incorporate both episodic and abstract aspects (Connine and Pinnow 2006; Pierrehumbert 2006; Sumner et al. 2014) have come into vogue. Such models parallel current neurolinguistic models (e.g., Paradis 2000) that recognize both implicit (related to abstract competence) and explicit (related to episodic processing) aspects of language processing in the brain. A hybrid model is outlined in Figure 16.1. Information flows from the exemplars – shown scattered across a hypothetical phonetic space – to the lexical representations, either via phonological coding or directly. The phonological coding component explains why speech shows categorical effects – e.g., heard sounds are immediately interpreted as one phonological category (a phoneme or allophone) or another, but not as some intermediate form. However, perceptual boundaries between those categories are capable of shifting over time as a person is exposed to input from different dialects, or the listener can develop customized perception norms for different dialects. The person’s production norms can also shift subtly, especially if he or she is immersed in a new dialectal setting. Episodic effects explain this flexibility. Memories of exemplars, especially the most salient ones – which are typically the phonetically most atypical ones – exhibit neural connections to memories of who said them, when they were said, and in what situation they were uttered, aiding the perception of speech uttered by diverse people. Production forms are selected to match remembered exemplars and they may be tailored to match the audience based on the remembered store of exemplars. Older episodic models appeared similar except that they lacked the phonological coding stage.
Further socio-production work has suggested that episodic representations can be sufficient for explaining how the “same” word may be realized differently according to social situation (Drager 2011) and for explaining lexical effects in sound change (Hay et al. 2015). Details about the social associations remain to be worked out. The statistical understanding that Johnson (1997) contended to be important for constructing phonetic forms might also be applied to other remembered aspects of exemplars; as Clark and Trousdale (2010) suggest, people may construct associations with social contexts, not just particular events, and link them cognitively with phonetic forms. Another such detail is that of why some exemplars are more salient than others. Sumner et al. (2014) argue that the simultaneous storage of linguistic and social information about exemplars is accompanied by social weighting so that some forms, such as certain hyperstandard forms – in their example, released, unglottalized final [t] as opposed to the glottalized, unreleased forms that are more common in conversational American English – receive more cognitive activation. A similar memory bias might be associated with forms uttered by people the listener wishes to emulate.
Sociophonetics has grown to become an essential element of phonetics, sociolinguistics, and laboratory phonology. In the process, it has become the favored paradigm for studies of variation in phonetic properties of languages. The major difficulty limiting its further growth is that practitioners frequently see it as just a methodological approach (especially in sociolinguistics) or as a convenient label for studies that involve dialectal variation (particularly in phonetics). It should be recognized that sociophonetics has a theoretical side that can serve as an avenue for exploration of major linguistic questions. One of these major issues is that of how linguistic change occurs. As discussed in earlier sections, a large proportion of sociophonetic work has been devoted to examining sound change, and these studies not only have permeated all types of phonetic factors but also have shown how pervasive variation is, how it operates in languages, and how communities can transition from one form to another. The next step is to explore the cognition of variation. Perception studies have begun to do that, but among production studies a disconnect has emerged between those that have focused on metalinguistic knowledge and those that have taken advantage of modern phonetic methods. That is, much sociolinguistic work on production in recent years has dealt with such issues as theories of identity construction, but these studies often rely on old methods such as auditory transcription; conversely, sociolinguistic studies that employ cutting-edge acoustic techniques seldom address the most current sociolinguistic theories.
A cognitive approach to sociophonetics must emphasize the indexicality of variants: what do people “know” about who uses a variant and the contexts in which people use it? This sort of work often focuses on social networks in asking which networks use a form, how a form can become an identity marker for a network, and how knowledge about usage and identity is disseminated through communities. Sociolinguists concerned with those issues can become preoccupied with the networks themselves, which certainly are sociologically important. However, linguists need to look toward how this metalinguistic information is cognitively linked to linguistic structures. For linguists, the ultimate goal is to discover how language is mentally encoded. Episodic accounts of language (along with hybrid models that include episodic components) suggest that all linguistic forms come with contextual information, and sociolinguistic research has shown that contextual knowledge directs linguistic choices at every level. As a result, understanding mental connections, not just between strictly linguistic levels such as lexical and post-lexical or implicit and explicit but between metalinguistic knowledge and linguistic structures, is what makes sociophonetics relevant for the larger enterprises in linguistics.
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