Sound Effects - Tracing the Origins of Social Meaning in Phonetic Variation (title of the SNF-project)

My doctoral research project examines how specific phonetic features contribute to the social perception and aesthetic evaluation of regional German varieties in the D-A-CH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) by German and non-German speakers. It explores how these features influence listeners’ judgements of beauty, eros and status, as well as dialect attributes, and how such perceptions relate to broader processes of indexicality, iconicity and language change. Moreover, it analyses the impact of listeners’ social factors on these evaluations. The project adopts a mixed-methods design. It integrates ABX discrimination tasks (Greenwald, 2017) to assess which variants are discriminable, with Implicit Association Tests to quantitatively access subconscious evaluative patterns and Real-Time Evaluations (RTEs), encompassing both quantitative and qualitative aspects, and sociolinguistic interviews to investigate explicit attitudes, language biographies, and linguistic perspectives. Drawing on Exemplar Theory (Johnson, 1997) and the REACT-framework (Purschke, 2015), this research explores how cognitive, linguistic, and social factors influence the evaluation of regional variation in speech, assessing the common hypotheses (inherent value, social connotations, imposed norm, familiarity). I will especially focus on the impact of social identity and biases, such as in-group favouritism. The project ultimately aims to develop a sociolinguistic model of sound aesthetics that accounts for the interplay between phonetic features, social meaning, and language attitudes. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on language perception, sociopragmatic indexicality, sociophonetic variation, and language change. Beyond its academic value, the research also has practical implications for language technology and raising public awareness of linguistic bias and discrimination.