Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Phonological characteristics of a voice, such as th-stopping(pronouncing them as “dem”) associated with AfricanAmerican English (AAE), provide indexical sociolinguisticinformation about the speaker. Word usage also signals thissocial dialect, i.e. usage of crib to mean house. The currentstudy examines the effect of these sociolinguisticcharacteristics on word recall, as well as the interactionbetween the phonological and the lexical levels of variation. Ina modified word recognition task, listeners displayed moreaccurate veridical word recall of AAE lexical items and voices.Furthermore, there was an interaction between phonologicaland lexical variation: listeners were even more accurate atrecognizing AAE-specific lexical items heard in an AAE voice.This study adds to a growing body of work finding thatsociolinguistic information influences word memory.