Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term sociophonetics refers to the study of those aspects of phonetic realization that vary as a function of a range of social factors, such as age, gender, ethnicity, class, style, and individual identity. In recent years there has been a sharply growing awareness that developing our understanding of how speaker performance is shaped by extra-linguistic factors associated with particular communicative situations is fundamental in building models of speech production, and this interface between the perspectives and paradigms conventionally adopted by sociolinguistic and phonetic research has come to be seen as the domain of sociophonetics (Damico & Ball, chapter 7 in this volume; Foulkes & Docherty, 2006; Hay & Drager, 2007). While the bulk of sociophonetic investigation focuses on speaker performance, there is a growing interest in the way in which the social-indexical information conveyed within the speech signal is accessed and interpreted by listeners, with the result that the scope of sociophonetics now extends uncontroversially to include issues relating to speech processing and perception (e.g. Bent & Pisoni, chapter 24 in this volume; Clopper, 2004; Clopper & Pisoni, 2004a, 2004b; Foulkes, 2005; Hay, Warren, & Drager, 2006).Likewise, since early perception shapes the child'sphonological acquisition and representations, an understanding of sociophonetic ... log in or subscribe to read full text