Speaker Gender and Salience in Sociolinguistic Speech Perception: goose-fronting in Standard Southern British English

Abstract

Listeners’ perceptions of sound changes may be influenced by priming them with social information about the speaker. It is not clear, however, whether this occurs for sociolinguistic variables that pass below the level of awareness. This article investigates whether visual speaker gender affects the perception of goose-fronting in Standard Southern British English, a sound change that is led by young women yet does not fulfil criteria for sociolinguistic salience. Participants from across the United Kingdom completed a word identification experiment based on a gender-ambiguous synthesized fleece-goose continuum while primed with an image of a man’s or a woman’s face. The study did not find a significant main effect of priming, but men identified fronter tokens as goose when primed with a woman’s face. I argue that sociolinguistic priming effects may be over-stated and that future priming experiments should be designed with maximal statistical power where possible.