Validating explicit rating tasks for measuring pronunciation biases: A case study of ING variation

Spoken language is highly variable, as words can have different pronunciation variants. A growing body of psycholinguistic research has employed experimental methods such as explicit rating tasks to obtain user biases toward different pronunciation variants. However, no prior work has empirically validated whether experimentally elicited user estimates accurately reflect real-world usage patterns. By correlating user estimates and conversational speech data for English variable ING pronunciations under different experimental prompts, we found that while rating tasks can provide word biases that do correlate significantly with corpus word biases, the correlations are only modest and there are asymmetries in the relationship between elicited word biases and corpus word biases. These findings call for future research to incorporate word biases into the study of sociolinguistic variation and language processing.