Estimating the Relative Sociolinguistic Salience of Segmental Variables in a Dialect Boundary Zone.

One way of evaluating the salience of a linguistic feature is by assessing the extent to which listeners associate the feature with a social category such as a particular socioeconomic class, gender, or nationality. Such 'top-down' associations will inevitably differ somewhat from listener to listener, as a linguistic feature - the pronunciation of a vowel or consonant, for instance - can evoke multiple social category associations, depending upon the dialect in which the feature is embedded and the context in which it is heard. In a given speech community it is reasonable to expect, as a consequence of the salience of the linguistic form in question, a certain level of intersubjective agreement on social category associations.