Sound change, priming, salience: Producing and perceiving variation in Liverpool English

Marten Juskan  

Synopsis

This volume investigates the realisation and perception of four phonological variables in Liverpool English (Scouse), with a special focus on their sociolinguistic salience. Younger speakers’ speech is found to be more local, but only for the two salient variables in the sample (NURSE-SQUARE and /k/ lenition), which appear to carry considerable amounts of covert prestige. Local variants of non-salient happy-tensing and velar nasal plus, on the other hand, are actually found to be receding, so at least to a certain extent Scouse also seems to be participating in regional dialect levelling. The importance of salience is also obvious in the perception data, with only the two highly salient stereotypes generating robust effects in a social priming experiment (albeit in the unexpected direction). These results indicate that the investigated variables differ measurably not only in their use in production, but also in terms of how central they are to mental sociolinguistic representations of Scouse. They also tell us more about the way we process, store, and (re-)use sociolinguistic variation in perception. By defining likely contexts for significant priming effects they might finally even help in coming up with a more elaborate “theory of priming” in the realm of sociophonetics.

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Author Biography

Marten Juskan

Marten Juskan studied English and French Philology at the universities of Freiburg, Grenoble, and Surrey. He received his PhD from Freiburg University in 2016 while working as a junior lecturer there. His primary research interests are sociophonetics, language perception, and urban accents. Marten currently holds a position as lecturer in English linguistics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Published

August 14, 2018
LaTeX source on GitHub
Cite as
Juskan, Marten. 2018. Sound change, priming, salience: Producing and perceiving variation in Liverpool English. (Language Variation 3). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1451308

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-119-1

Publication date (01)

2018-10-11

doi

10.5281/zenodo.1451308

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-120-7