Speech samples in analysis of language attitudes

Samples of speech obtained under naturalistic conditions were combined with subjective reaction tests to measure attitudes toward dialect interaction and language change. A specific sound change, the merger of American English vowels in words like caught and cot, was investigated. Early results of the experiments indicated that this change was socially motivated, but later, more sophisticated experiments indicated that arguments for a social motivation for this particular change are too simplistic and rest upon too slender an empirical base. Experiments in the interaction of phonology and perception show that for this sound change various psycholinguistic factors, especially difficulties in discriminating among speech sounds, have to be taken into account.Support for the research reported on in this paper was provided by the Danforth Foundation, the University of Oregon, the University of Tromsø, and the University of Cincinnati. Earlier, partial versions were presented at the Fifth Western Conference on Linguistics, the Fourth Annual Colloquium on New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English, the Second Annual Kentucky Interdisciplinary Conference on Linguistics, and the 1976 Midwest Meeting of the American Dialect Society. The paper has benefited from the many constructive remarks it has drawn at these meetings. Those inaccuracies and examples of plain wrong-headedness that remain are, of course, entirely my own.