What the Heck Is Salience? How Predictive Language Processing Contributes to Sociolinguistic Perception

Frontiers in Psychology

T. Florian Jaeger¹ 

关键词: accent;    dialect;    idiolect;    salience;    surprisal;    prediction;    expectation;    learning;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01115

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Some sociolinguistic variables are prone to hypercorrection, stigmatization and style shifting, while other variables are not. The status of the former type—sometimes called stereotypes and markers (Labov, 1972)—has been attributed to the increased meta-linguistic awareness language users seem to have of these variables. This awareness in turn is attributed to the salience of these variables, such that greater salience is assumed to cause greater meta-linguistic awareness (e.g., Trudgill, 1986). Salience has similarly been invoked when aiming to explain implicit social inferences about, or attitudes toward, speakers who exhibit certain variables in their speech (Babel, 2016; Drager and Kirtley, 2016; Squires, 2016). However, salience is a hard to define concept (for review, see Auer et al., 1998; Kerswill and Williams, 2002) and, partly as a consequence, “notoriously difficult to quantify” (Hickey, 2000). For a concept that plays such a central and ubiquitous role in sociolinguistic explanations, this is arguably a dangerous state of affairs.

【 授权许可】

CC BY