Quantifying metalinguistic awareness of sociophonetic features

Abstract

Metalinguistic awareness of sociophonetic features may vary based on social or individual factors (e.g. dialect region, production, perception), as well as properties of the dialects or features themselves (e.g. their markedness). It is necessary to quantify metalinguistic awareness in order to consider these relationships statistically. This study tests a method of quantifying metalinguistic awareness using three tasks (written dialect description, written dialect identification, auditory dialect identification) and four sociophonetic features of North American English (/\ae g/-raising, /aj/-monophthongization and, Canadian raising of /aj/ and /aw/, considered separately). It finds that it is possible to quantify metalinguistic awareness, but that other modes of folk linguistic awareness, such as detail and accuracy, contribute differentially to the tasks used in this study.