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Experimental Evidence for Expectation-Driven Linguistic Convergence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Lacey Wade
Lacey Wade*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
*
laceya@sas.upenn.edu
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Abstract

This article examines the role of sociolinguistic expectations in linguistic convergence, using glide-weakened /aɪ/—a salient feature of Southern US English—as a test case. I present the results of two experiments utilizing a novel experimental paradigm for eliciting convergence—the WORD-NAMING GAME task—in which participants read aloud (baseline) or hear (exposure) clues describing particular words and then give their guesses out loud. Participants converged toward a Southern-shifted model talker by producing more glide-weakened tokens of /aɪ/, without ever hearing the model talker produce this vowel. Participants in the control (Midland talker) condition exhibited no such response. Convergence was facilitated by both living in the South and producing less-weakened baseline /aɪ/ glides, but attitudinal and domain-general individual-differences measures did not reliably predict convergence behaviors. Results are discussed in terms of implications for the cognitive mechanisms underlying convergence behaviors and the mental representations of sociolinguistic knowledge.

Keywords

sociolinguistic cognitionconvergenceindividual differencesexperimental sociolinguisticsSouthern US speechglide-weakened /aɪ/

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 98 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 63 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This work was funded by NSF grant BCS-1917900. I'd like to thank Andries Coetzee, Lauren Hall-Lew, Abby Walker, and an anonymous referee for thoughtful feedback that ultimately improved this paper. Thanks also to project RAs Sadie Butcher and Leila Pearlman for their tireless work editing TextGrids, to Walt Wolfram for helping me recruit participants at NCSU and letting me borrow his office for the week, and to Meredith Tamminga, Gareth Roberts, David Embick, and members of the Language Variation and Cognition lab at Penn for feedback at various stages of this project. All remaining errors are of course my own.

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