I’m interested in how we listen to others’ voices and interpret them in relation to what we already know about others and the world. I’m drawn to further understanding this sociolinguistic practice in two dimensions: first, in the social evaluations from listeners’ interpretations of others’ voices, accents, and styles; and second, in listeners’ mental representations of sociolinguistic meaning.
I’m happy to share slides/copies of the projects below, so don’t hesitate to reach out!
Publications
Stecker, A. & D’Onofrio, A. Accepted. Variation in evaluations of gendered voices: Individual speakers condition the variant frequency effect. Journal of English Linguistics.
D’Onofrio, Annette & Amelia Stecker. 2020. The social meaning of stylistic variability: Sociophonetic (in)variance in presidential candidates’ campaign rallies. Language in Society. Online first.
Stecker, A. Investigations of the sociolinguistic monitor and perceived gender identity. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 26(2): 119-128.
Presentations
Politics and indexicality of Southern U.S. English
In a series of perception experiments, Jaime Benheim and I investigate the indexical links between US Southern varieties and political conservative ideology, and the social meaning construed in performances of mock-Southern stylizations.
Benheim, J. & Stecker, A. 2021. Political ideology, masculinity, and the indexical associations of Southern US English. Poster presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 49. University of Texas, Austin, TX [Virtual due to COVID-19]. October 19-24.
Gender, variant frequency, and social evaluations of speakers
In this study, Annette D’Onofrio and I conduct a matched-guise task to compare listeners’ evaluations of ten speakers producing varying proportions ING’s variants (–ing vs. –in), investigating whether listeners evaluate men and women differently for using –in at the same rates of production. Findings show that speakers’ greater usage of the –in variant yields more negative evaluations from listeners, and listeners but this trend did not differ between different speaker genders. Rather, differences in evaluations of individual speakers persist across and within gendered categories, bearing implications for notions of binary gender and single-speaker matched-guise paradigms.
Stecker, A. 2019. Gender, variant frequency, and social evaluations of speakers. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 48. University of Oregon, OR. October 10-12. Poster presented at the 24th Annual Mid-Continental Phonetics and Phonology Conference.
The social meaning of stylistic variability: Sociophonetic (in)variance in presidential candidates’ campaign rallies
Annette D’Onofrio and I explore how two well-studied variables — ING and t-release — are recruited by three presidential candidates in campaign rallies. We quantify the variability a given candidate shows in deploying these features across eight campaign rallies in different locations. Differences emerged in the degree and nature of variance a given candidate exhibited in the use of these features across rally locales and topics discussed. Our results suggest that the degree to which a candidate produces variability in their production of sociolinguistic variables across speech events can be a meaningful feature toward an ideological public image of flexibility or consistency, suggesting that the amount of variability a speaker exhibits across contexts is itself a dimension of sociolinguistic style.
D’Onofrio, A. & Stecker, A. 2018. The social meaning of stylistic variability: Sociophonetic (in)variance in presidential candidates’ campaign rallies. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 47. New York University, NY. October 18-21.