Language Attitudes and Stereotypes Condition the Processing of Contact-Induced Linguistic Variants

Abstract

This study examines the effect of language attitudes and stereotypes on vowel perceptions by two groups of listeners from Asturias, Spain that differ in their relationship with the languages present in their communities: Spanish, the national majority language, and Asturian, the regional minority language. The responses of 165 participants from the Nalón Valley (a mining area in the region) were compared with those of 156 listeners from Gijón (the largest urban area) as they categorized words containing synthesized productions of Spanish [o] and Asturian [u] in a task that combined binary forced-choice identification and visual priming. The results of a mixed-effects regression model reveal that, for the Nalón Valley group, positive attitudes toward Asturian result in higher rates of /u/ selection, while, for the Gijón group, positive attitudes toward Asturian intersect with negative stereotypes about urban Asturians who avoid the regional language. We propose that spreading activation and weighting in exemplar-based models can account for these different findings: the greater use of Asturian in the Nalón Valley results in weaker and more varied links between vowel exemplars and social properties, limiting the effect of visual priming. However, a heavier weight exists between stereotypes of urban Asturians and Spanish exemplars in the city, resulting in a priming effect in Gijón that does not emerge in the Nalón Valley. We conclude that individual experience, attitudes, and stereotypes work together to condition speech perception uniquely in light of the local context.