The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched

Past production research on the California Vowel Shift (CVS) has suggested that the CVS carries social meanings of carefreeness, Whiteness, femininity, and privilege (e.g., Eckert 2008b), but it is unclear whether these social meanings reflect listener perceptions. In the present study, Californian listeners heard speech samples, guessed where speakers were from, and rated speakers on language attitudes scales; stimuli in this task were matched guises differing by speakers’ use of two CVS features. The results indicated that listeners associate these features with Californianness, sounding like a Valley girl, and (for male speakers) confidence, complicating the social meanings suggested by production studies. I discuss these results in terms of how interaction context guides the perception of social meaning by activating subsets of the indexical field. This research also introduces two innovative methods for investigating sociolinguistic perception: stimuli created using resynthesized vowels within spontaneous speech produced by multiple speakers, and statistical inference via Bayesian hierarchical modeling