Abstract Social salience, the association of a social category with linguistic variables, has been hypothesized to be an important driver of language change. This hypothesis has not been rigorously tested due to the lack of a reliable measure of social salience. In this paper, we present Salience Categorization Test (Sali-CAT), a new approach to measuring the association of word variants with social categories across multiple lexical variables. The approach includes a customized experimental paradigm (three alternative forced choice) and a statistical method to establish the baseline Salience Ratio (Sali-RAT) score for word variants that do not have a bias in usage with respect to the social categories. We demonstrate the approach by testing the association of multiple variables with different generations of speakers in the Gurindji speech community.
Hua et al. (Mon,) studied this question.