“Does this make sense?”: The effect of matching guise in regional accent on grammatical acceptability judgments

Authors

  • Nour Kayali University of Kentucky

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5525

Keywords:

syntax, speech perception, grammaticality judgment task, language and place

Abstract

Syntax and sociophonetics are typically treated as wildly disjointed (possibly even incompatible) theoretical pursuits. This paper seeks to unite sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by presenting participants with matching or mismatching social expectations during a structural grammaticality judgment task. Place is the unifying social association between guise and structure. Participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey with place-based grammatical structures spoken in either a matching place-based, local accent or a nonlocal accent. Place-based structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. These results suggest that judgment of grammaticality results from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with accent and sentence structure. Judgment of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation.

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Published

2023-04-27

How to Cite

Kayali, Nour. 2023. “‘Does This Make sense?’: The Effect of Matching Guise in Regional Accent on Grammatical Acceptability Judgments”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 8 (1): 5525. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5525.