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SymposiumThursday, 3 JanuaryPreston, Dennis. 1996. Whaddayaknow: The modes of folk linguistic awareness. Language Awareness 5.40-74.Silverstein, Michael. 1981. The limits of awareness. Texas Working Papers in Linguistics 84.1-30.Abstracts:Kevin B. McGowan (Rice University)Sounding Chinese and listening Chinese: imitation, perception, and awareness of non-native phonologyPrevious research has shown that socioindexical expectations can enhance perception of a Chinese-accented voice for bothexperienced and inexperienced listeners. Inexperienced listeners appear to draw upon phonological stereotypes from across socialboundaries. This paper explores a possible source of inexperienced listener expectations. Native English-speaking Americanactors recorded a set of scripted materials both with and without an imitated Mandarin Chinese accent. These actors invoke apercept of ‘Chinese’ for American audiences by performing highly salient features of an American audience conceptualization ofauthentic Chinese-accented English. Imitations such as these may, indeed, play a role in establishing and reifying thisconceptualization. Actors in this study produced a mixture of Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese features in the imitated accentcondition. The performed Chinese accents comprise a mixture of the actors' native accents alongside stereotypes, markers,indicators and unexpected features. Implications for theories of speech perception and sociophonetics are explored.Jen Nycz (Georgetown University)Awareness and acquisition of new dialect featuresI investigate the effect of awareness of dialect differences on the acquisition of second dialect features by native speakers ofCanadian English (CE) in the New York City (NYC) region, focusing on the COT, CAUGHT, MOUTH, and PRICE wordclasses. While CE is characterized by the merger of the vowels in cot/caught and raised (aw) and (ay) nuclei in pre-voicelesscontexts, the NYC dialect contrasts cot/caught and does not raise diphthongal nuclei. Speaker participated in sociolinguisticinterviews and tasks designed to elicit their metalinguistic knowledge about features of both dialects. The speakers show evidenceof gradient shifts towards NYC-like realizations of all four word classes. However, they maintain high (aw)s, even though thisfeature is a stereotype of CE that most wish to eliminate from their speech. I discuss the methodological issues raised by thisfinding as well as its theoretical implications.Lauren Squires (The Ohio State University)Morphosyntactic variation in self-paced reading: knowledge and processing versus awareness and evaluationThis paper explores the relationship between English speakers' processing and awareness of morphosyntactic variability. A selfpacedreading experiment presented sentences word-by-word, measuring reading times at each word. Target sentences occurred inthree subject-verb agreement conditions: standard (NP SG +doesn't; NP PL +don't), nonstandard (NP SG +don't), and ungrammatical(NP PL +doesn't). A post-experiment questionnaire asked participants to describe anything they noticed about the grammar of thesentences. "Aware" participants were those who mentioned don't, doesn't, or subject-verb agreement, while "unaware"participants did not mention these patterns. Results show that aware participants' reading was slowed by nonstandard agreementand even more so by ungrammatical agreement, as compared to the standard agreement conditions. However, unawareparticipants were only marginally affected by ungrammatical sentences and were unaffected by nonstandard sentences. Further,fewer aware participants explicitly mentioned the ungrammatical pattern than the nonstandard pattern. Implications are discussedfor our understanding of the relations between implicit knowledge and explicit evaluation of grammatical variation.Katie Carmichael (The Ohio State University)Place-linked expectations and listener awareness of regional dialects: an experimental approachParticipants were asked to rate accented and unaccented speakers said to be from different regions within the US. Based onpatterning of results and follow-up commentary from participants, I argue that participants used their awareness of regionaldialects and their intuitions about speakers’ control over their accents to inform their evaluations. Participants down-rated thosespeakers perceived as accented who were said to be from a place associated with lack of accent. Being accented from a placewhere accentedness is expected, however, did not elicit down-rating and in some cases even resulted in up-rating. Follow-upinterviews indicated that participants viewed the place-accent link as almost deterministic—speakers from a place where accentsare expected are not considered to have control over their accent and are thus not at fault for being accented. Thus awareness of alink between regional accents and certain places set up sociolinguistic expectations that affected speaker evaluations.91