Chapter 11
Linguistic Security, Ideology, and Vowel Perception
Nancy Niedzielski, Rice University
- Introduction
Recent technological advances have greatly increased the sociophonetician’s
ability to capture a vast array of very different types of data. Powerful and
easily available programs like Praat have allowed sociophoneticians the abil-
ity to capture even the slightest variation in the acoustic signal, revealing, as
this volume shows, degrees of variability in production that would be impos-
sible to discover using auditory methods alone. Programs such as Praat offer
an additional tool, however: the ability to manipulate the acoustic signal.
Researchers can synthesize and resynthesize speech relatively quickly, and
the results are of high enough quality to be used in perceptual work. More
recent technology, such as eye-tracking and brain-imaging, have allowed the
sociophonetician to discover in even more intricate detail how sociophonetic
variation is perceived. Thus, work on the both the production and the percep-
tion of variation have become important components of sociophonetics, and
interesting and complex interactions between the two of these components
moves forward our understanding of language variation and change.
While research on the perception of sociophonetic variation using these
varied methodologies has offered valuable insight into both implicit and
explicit knowledge of variation, it has placed questions regarding social cog-
nition ¿ rmly at the forefront: what do people know about sociophonetic varia-
tion? While decades of research on language attitudes and ideologies have
shown that knowledge of variation is often not accurate, it is not clear exactly
why such inaccurate “knowledge” persists in the face of even substantial
counter-evidence.
In the following sections, I examine some of the ¿ ndings from recent
work on the perception of talker variation, not only in sociophonetics, but in
psychology as well. I will suggest that different methodologies from these
two ¿ elds offer insights into what human perceivers know implicitly, and sug-
gest that while the more accurate implicit knowledge is crucial in the process
of language change, language attitudes affect the often less accurate explicit