This matched-guise experiment assessed whether sociolinguistic judgments are subject to incrementality, with judgments increasing in magnitude as variable stimuli demonstrate more extreme differences in some critical dimension. In particular, this task tested whether it is possible to trigger judgments of Barack Obama as “more” or “less” black (e.g., Alim & Smitherman 2011) by manipulating his intonational contours.
Stimuli were derived from twenty declarative Intonational Phrases with H* and/or L+H* pitch accents (following ToBI conventions for Mainstream American English of Beckman and Ayers 1997). Ten phrases featured L+H* pitch accents—which occur more frequency in African American Language (AAL) (Holliday 2016)—and ten featured H* pitch accents. Four stimuli apiece were created from these twenty phrases by using Praat to make each pitch accent more extreme by semitone-based F0 steps, yielding a four-way Manipulation Step factor. Seventy-nine American English listeners rated these stimuli in randomized order by responding to the question “How black does Obama sound here?”.
A mixed-effects regression model of ratings assessed the interaction of Pitch Accent type, Manipulation Step, and Boundary Tone, with Phrase nested within Pitch Accent. No main effect for Pitch Accent type emerged, indicating no rating differences for L+H* and H* phrases overall (p=.27), despite the higher likelihood of occurrence of L+H* in AAL. However, the interaction of Pitch Accent and Manipulation Step was significant, with more extreme L+H* phrases rated as more black (ps<.05); no such effect was observed among manipulation steps for H*-containing phrases. No listener demographic factors (e.g., listener race, gender, political affiliation) significantly affected blackness ratings.
These results indicate that listeners’ sociolinguistic perceptions are sensitive to the magnitude of the input, a finding that indicates promising directions for research in language attitudes and sociolinguistic cognition.
References
Alim, H. S., and Smitherman, G., 2012. Articulate while Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the US. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beckman, M. E., and Ayers, G., 1997. Guidelines for ToBI labelling. The OSU Research Foundation, 3.
Holliday, N., 2016. Intonational Variation and the Black/Biracial Experience. Doctoral dissertation, New York University.
