“Does this make sense?”: The effect of matching guise in regional accent on grammatical acceptability judgments

Syntax and sociophonetics are typically treated as wildly disjointed (possibly even incompatible) theoretical pursuits. This paper seeks to unite sociophonetic speech perception syntax research by presenting participants with matching or mismatching social expectations during a structural grammaticality judgment task. Place is the unifying association between guise structure. Participants completed between-subjects matched survey place-based grammatical structures spoken in either place-based, local accent nonlocal accent. Place-based consistently rated more acceptable than nonlocal. These results suggest that of from an interplay sociocultural sentence Judgment not independent expectation.