Intraspeaker phonological priming in sociolinguistic variation

Experimental studies of priming have shown that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen or heard (Bock 1986; Bock & Branigan et al 2000). A growing body of work from corpus... [ view full abstract ]

Experimental studies of priming have shown that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen or heard (Bock 1986; Bock & Branigan et al 2000). A growing body of work from corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics suggests that this also happens in more natural types of speech (Gries 2005; Szmrecsanyi 2006; Poplack 1980; Travis 2007).  The idea that speakers use clusters of similar variants in natural running speech has been reported before in sociolinguistics but the suggestion has been that repetition is under the control of the speaker as they engage in the construction and maintenance of sociolinguistic style (Eckert and Rickford 2001). This paper is part of a recent attempt to open up an intriguing possibility: that previous work invoking style as an explanation could perhaps be equally well, if not better, explained by models of priming (Tamminga (2016), Clark (2014, forthcoming).

This paper examines evidence for within-speaker repetition effects by exploring data from a corpus of NZ English monologues.  We present data from 4 phonological variables: word medial intervocalic /t/, KIT, DRESS and STRUT.  By fitting mixed effect regression models incorporating both the realisation of the preceding variable, and a range of other linguistic and social predictors, we show two main findings that are of interest to sociolinguistics:

• Speakers show a repetition effect reminiscent of priming for those variables undergoing change (i.e. medial /t/, KIT and DRESS).  This has methodological implications: it could mean that a proportion of the variation that has previously been attributed to sociolinguistic factors could potentially be attributed to more mechanistic repetition effects. 
• In the case of medial /t/, priming interacts with the speaker’s gender.  No psycholinguistic work predicts different priming behaviour for males and females and most sociolinguistic work assumes that men and women from the same speech community will share the same ‘internal’ constraints on variation.      

We therefore argue that this work benefits sociolinguistics by suggesting that phonological variation is responsive not only to style but also to psycholinguistic factors like priming.