Linguistic Security, Ideology, and Vowel Perception 263In this chapter I have claimed that work in both sociophonetics and psy-
chology suggests ways in which implicit knowledge allows language change
to progress in a subconscious but systematic way. Furthermore, I suggest that
explicit knowledge is often inaccurate due to language attitudes, particularly
in the case of the linguistically secure speaker. I offer a ¿ lter model for why,
even with long-term exposure to acoustic evidence to the contrary, speakers
would persist in their beliefs of (often inaccurate) “knowledge” about lan-
guage variation.
Future sociophonetic work will perhaps reveal clearer interactions
between language attitudes and these two types of knowledge, and the role
that each plays in the production and perception of language variation.
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