Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.
Cogn Sci. 2023 May;47(5):e13290. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13290.
We investigated the emergence of sociolinguistic indexicality using an artificial-language-learning paradigm. Sociolinguistic indexicality involves the association of linguistic variants with nonlinguistic social or contextual features. Any linguistic variant can acquire "constellations" of such indexical meanings, though they also exhibit an ordering, with first-order indices associated with particular speaker groups and higher-order indices targeting stereotypical attributes of those speakers. Much natural-language research has been conducted on this phenomenon, but little experimental work has focused on how indexicality emerges. Here, we present three miniature artificial-language experiments designed to break ground on this question. Results show ready formation of first-order indexicality based on co-occurrence alone, with higher-order indexicality emerging as a result of extension to new speaker groups, modulated by the perceived practical importance of the indexed social feature.
我们使用人工语言学习范式研究了社会语言索引的出现。社会语言索引涉及语言变体与非语言的社会或上下文特征的关联。任何语言变体都可以获得这种索引意义的“组合”，尽管它们也存在一种排序，其中一阶索引与特定的说话者群体相关联，而高阶索引则针对这些说话者的刻板属性。关于这种现象已经进行了大量的自然语言研究，但很少有实验工作关注索引的出现方式。在这里，我们提出了三个小型的人工语言实验，旨在对此问题进行初步研究。结果表明，仅基于共现就可以很容易地形成一阶索引，而随着向新的说话者群体的扩展，以及感知到索引的社会特征的实际重要性的调节，高阶索引也会出现。
