Past production research on the California Vowel Shift (CVS) has suggested that the CVS carries social meanings of carefreeness, Whiteness, femininity, and privilege (e.g., Eckert 2008b), but it is unclear whether these social meanings reflect listener perceptions. In the present study, Californian listeners heard speech samples, guessed where speakers were from, and rated speakers on language attitudes scales; stimuli in this task were matched guises differing by speakers’ use of two CVS features. The results indicated that listeners associate these features with Californianness, sounding like a Valley girl, and (for male speakers) confidence, complicating the social meanings suggested by production studies. I discuss these results in terms of how interaction context guides the perception of social meaning by activating subsets of the indexical field. This research also introduces two innovative methods for investigating sociolinguistic perception: stimuli created using resynthesized vowels within spontaneous speech produced by multiple speakers, and statistical inference via Bayesian hierarchical modeling.

中文翻译：

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社会意义的建构：对加州元音移位的匹配调查

过去对加利福尼亚元音转换 (CVS) 的制作研究表明，CVS 具有无忧无虑、白人、女性气质和特权等社会意义（例如，Eckert 2008b），但尚不清楚这些社会意义是否反映了听众的看法。在本研究中，加州听众听到语音样本，猜测说话者来自哪里，并根据语言态度量表对说话者进行评分；此任务中的刺激是匹配的伪装，因说话者使用两个 CVS 功能而异。结果表明，听众将这些特征与加利福尼亚气质联系起来，听起来像一个山谷女孩，以及（对于男性演讲者）自信，使生产研究建议的社会意义复杂化。我根据交互上下文如何通过激活索引字段的子集来引导对社会意义的感知来讨论这些结果。这项研究还介绍了两种调查社会语言感知的创新方法：在由多个说话者产生的自发语音中使用重新合成的元音创建的刺激，以及通过贝叶斯分层建模进行的统计推断。