Stylistically coherent variants: Cognitive representation of social meaning.

The perception of social meanings and styles is dependent upon the contributions of a constellation of multiple covarying sociolinguistic variants. This suggests that listeners maintain associations between stylistically coherent variants and their social meanings in mental representation. The present paper expands upon this notion, aiming to gain converging evidence from production as a way to explore the cognitive representations of variants and their social meanings more deeply. To do this, four American English speakers were asked to produce sentences containing (ING) words (as in talking vs. talkin'), in their -in and -ing variants, in a laboratory setting. Productions were acoustically analyzed to evaluate whether the speakers also manipulated other stylistically-linked variables, even though prompted only to manipulate (ING). The variant -in has been shown to index a range of social meanings in American English, including Southern and casual. Results demonstrate that speakers indeed modulated other variables beyond (ING) in ways that align with the Southern and casual social meanings of -in. That producing one variant (-in) could lead to stylistically congruent realizations of other variables suggests that speakers not only hold indexical linkages between variants and styles in mental representation, but that variants are also linked to variants of other variables through associations with those styles. A better understanding of social meaning in cognition provides an important base upon which to advance research on sociolinguistic perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]