Mechanisms of meaning making in the co-occurrence of pragmatic markers with silent pauses

This study explores the social meanings of unfilled pauses, you know, like, and combinations thereof by comparing the evaluation of speech with these features to speech without them. The comparison is based on a set of perception surveys in which participants listened to manipulated audio stimuli and rated them on a series of scales. Unfilled pauses are evaluated differently from all other features: they are rated high on Status and low on Dynamism. Where significant differences emerge, the pragmatic markers you know, like, and combinations of pauses with these are always rated lower than the guises without. They are most sensitive to personal characteristics in the Dynamism dimension, followed by Conversational Skills, Likeability, and Status. The mechanism that adapts the potential social meanings of linguistic features when they are combined hinges on the social salience of the features in question. Various outcomes are possible ranging from additive to non-additive effects. (Like, you know, attitudes, social meanings, prestige, solidarity, dynamism)

Some practical considerations for using audio stimuli in acceptability judgment experiments

In this paper, we argue that moving away from written stimuli in acceptability judgment experiments is a necessary step to address the systematic exclusion of particular empirical phenomena, languages/varieties, and speakers in (psycho)linguistics (e.g., Anand, Chung, & Wagers 2011). We provide user-friendly guidelines for conducting acceptability experiments which use audio stimuli in three platforms: Praat, Qualtrics, and PennController for Ibex (Zehr & Schwarz 2018). Finally, we qualitatively compare the results of two experiments investigating English constituent order using audio and written stimuli. We hope this paper will not only increase the types of languages, speakers, and phenomena which are included in experimental syntax, but help researchers who are interested in conducting experiments overcome the initial learning curve.

Social Meanings across Listener Groups

This study compares the group-specific evaluations of (t) in Greater Manchester, England, with those of (ing) published in a previous study. The comparison is based on a set of perception surveys, in which study participants listened to manipulated audio stimuli and rated them on a series of scales. In contrast to findings for (ing), the social characteristics of listeners are not pertinent to the evaluation of (t): most social meanings associated with (t) are shared across the Greater Manchester population. It is argued that this is due to the pronounced attitude strength of T-glottalling in this particular region.

Creating the Sound of Sarcasm

The study of spoken language requires controlling multiple aspects of the speech signal. Here we report a procedure to create a sarcastic version of sincerely spoken audio stimuli by changing aspects of prosody relevant to sarcasm (pitch, pace, and loudness) while controlling all other acoustic differences. Two rating experiments validated the efficacy of this procedure for spoken conversations (“Maybe they are more delicate than you realized”) and descriptions (“Angie thanked John for doing such a great job”; emphasis indicates manipulation).