The Perception of Pitch-width in Turkish and Indexicality in the Framework of Sociophonetics

In variationist sociolinguistics that emerged out of the works by Labov (1966), social meaning has been defined by linking linguistic variables (i.e. Prosody, word, affix, allophones) to broad social categories (i.e. Gender, class and region). However, the studies given lately assert that the social meaning is found in the society in dynamic and cumulative ways (Agha, 2003; Eckert, 2008; Silverstein, 2003). This ideologically accumulated knowledge, which is either called as ‘indexical order’ (Silverstein, 2003) or ‘indexical field’ (Eckert, 2008), has been described as collective social meanings which are not stable and fixed and thus bearing the probability of changing according to social movements. In this regard, this study, which resides in the field of sociophonetics, aims to uncover indexical fields that emerge in the perception of pitch-width, e.g., the range between the highest and the lowest pitch in speech. With this aim, the study focuses on the perception of speech, and not how people speak. A tripartite experimental design has been employed: (i) In the first stage, recordings were adopted by speakers through interviews and map-task (N=8) to form speech stimuli. (ii) Then, the speech stimuli were further manipulated in terms of pitch-width and duration to create tokens. (iii) In the last stage, the 12 tokens determined were presented to the perception of the listeners through sociolinguistic group interviews (N=52) and matched-guise survey (Lambert et al., 1960) (In three sessions, N=224). The qualitative findings yielded by the sociolinguistic group interviews which were conducted with university students were later presented to random population through matched-guise survey, and the quantitative results obtained from the survey were analysed by employing factor analysis and linear/mixed effect models. As a result, it has been found that the indexical fields on the pitch-width are determined by the perceived education level of the speakers. In the indexical interpretation of ‘education level’, there are such implications as dominance, having a job which requires distinct education level, using standard language, reliability and formality