Shadowing Practice: Are we WRONG about most FAMOUS LINGUISTICS experiment?? - Learn English Speaking with Video

recognize that this is coming from a place of respect and love.

If you're a sociolinguist, take a deep breath, maybe sit down before watching the rest.

Hi everybody, welcome back to the channel.

I mentioned in a recent video

that I had what we might call unorthodox views about probably the most famous experiment in linguistics

and one of the founding studies in sociolinguistics, and a lot of you were here for it.

If you're new to the channel, I'm Dr. Taylor Jones, I've got a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, and on the channel I discuss everything related to language, linguistics, language learning, and culture.

If you're into those topics, be sure to subscribe and ring the bell for notifications.

This one is going to be spicy, so send it to a linguist you know.

I have a dream of my YouTube video being this generation's unpublished letter from Vernot to Chomsky, and if this gets more than 5 ,000 views,

then it's already doing better than a top paper in Language or Glossa.

Anyway, I studied under Bill LeBeau.

I was actually his last advisee, and he came out of semi -retirement to attend my dissertation defense

and actually put his signature as a stamp of approval on my dissertation.

And if you don't know, Bill Leboe basically invented sociolinguistics.

Some things that people might take for granted today about the role of society in shaping language are things

that he introduced more or less single -handedly.

In the 1960s, he published field -changing, world -altering papers at a blistering pace.

In 1963, he published a study of the speech community on Martha's Vineyard

that seemed to show that people unconsciously change how they spoke based on their orientation toward or away from their local community.

In 1964, he published a study conducted in department stores in New York City

that related whether you say fourth floor or fourth floor to the perceived prestige of your job on the micro level.

People who all had the same job spoke differently at Saks versus at Macy's or at S.

Klein.

In 1966, he published The Social Stratification of English in New York City.

In 1972, he published Language in the Inner City, which was a book -length treatment of Black English as its own logical linguistic system, its own ethnolect.

Along the way, he gave us the idea of the linguistic variable, that is, variations in pronunciation are not random, but might be different instances of the same variable

that is socially evaluated and therefore subject to both linguistic pressures like careful speaking

and social pressures like being in an interview or talking to your boss.

He introduced the concept of social stratification affecting language.

He single -handedly came up with the Rapid Anonymous survey where he elicited casual speech by like shopping and shit.

So the field of sociolinguistics isn't just indebted to Lebov, it was created, sustained, and more or less fueled by Lebov.

And by the time I was in grad school, there was a cult of personality around Bill.

There were orthodoxies in how to interpret what he wrote.

At conferences, you'd get on an elevator and people would say fourth floor as a kind of nerd shibboleth and then giggle.

One conference I went to, the conference shirt just had his face on it.

I was asked if I wanted one and I said, as his advisee, I see enough of his mug.

I don't need to see it when I look in the mirror.

This went over like a lead balloon.

So you can see why I might have been more than

a little hesitant to criticize the orthodoxy around the department store study.

But on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the social stratification of English in New York City, I think now's a good time.

And whatever else anybody could say about Bill, he was a staunch defender of academic inquiry, empiricism, and the scientific method.

No one person I've ever met in my life has loved to be proven wrong more than Bill Lebov.

And I wish I could share these thoughts with him, but I'll share them with you all instead.

So today I'm talking about the social stratification of R in New York City in November of 1962, what people think it means, what people have read into it since then,

and the ways I think Lebov actually did a completely different study than we, or even he, thought he had done.

This is Language Jones.

The first thing I have to do is just set the scene.

In the 1960s, we already had tons and tons of recordings of people, and linguists had a pretty sophisticated understanding of language variation and change over time.

We kind of forget that because of the Chomskyan revolution and because of, well, all of Bill's contributions to our knowledge in the 1960s,

but he was very much in conversation with a tradition of dialectology that stretched back at least over a century.

Ironically, I have the impression that most of his students

and acolytes don't really read what he was influenced by and in conversation with.

Meillet and Martinet and Jacobson and Saussure and Venker and the delightfully named Jules Girond.

So LeBeauve was really interested in the question of how regular

and exceptionless sound change is over time in a given speech community, which can be defined in different ways

and he was really interested in the ways

that sound change seemed to not be exceptionless and tidy

and how an individual speaker may produce a bunch of different variations of the same word or sound.

And the 1962 department store study was first

and foremost his attempt to build on his introduction of the linguistic variable using a new technique, the rapid anonymous survey.

So, a linguistic variable is this idea that if I say I or I in the word night,

or if I do or don't pronounce the R's after vowels in words like fourth floor, it might not be random variation, but rather a choice between two equally meaningful variants.

Obviously, the choice between for and for doesn't affect the meaning of the word.

So, he had the idea that the thing that made the difference meaningful was social, the social interpretation of a linguistic form.

This is absolutely revolutionary.

The problem is that his thinking is a little more abstract than social evaluation on the individual level, which was not really all that new.

After all, we already knew that the upper class and middle class and lower classes often spoke differently,

and even already knew that the middle classes spoke in some ways more correctly than the upper class.

Hypercorrection.

We knew that as early as the 1930s.

People often act like that was LeBeau's contribution, but it wasn't.

First, he was interested in the linguistic system as a whole.

First on Martha's Vineyard, which was relatively homogenous, and later in New York City, which is, well, not.

In fact, he goes so far as to write, quote, the language community is prior to the individual in 1968,

and that, quote, language is an abstract pattern exterior to the individual.

In fact, it can be argued

that the individual does not exist as a linguistic entity in

the second edition of the social stratification of English in New York City.

So he's trying to look at social stratification, which he frankly always did kind of a poor job of precisely defining.

And the department store study was based on this idea

that people at the same level in a socioeconomic hierarchy might

still reflect micro differences in their probabilistic production of a given linguistic variable, whether or not you pronounce R after a vowel.

On the aggregate, in a way that's a microcosm of the then changing pattern in New York City, R -lessness had been the prestige form up through the 1940s,

with our pronunciation considered a, quote, provincialism.

But it started to be replaced by viewing ourfulness as the prestige default form and our dropping as substandard.

That shift is ongoing, but there's another element that LeBeau have introduced, covert prestige.

You can represent yourself as street smart, tough, savvy, authentically New York, and a whole slew of other things by saying New York

and coffee and various other linguistic variables that might be correlated with identity.

He went to Sachs, Macy's, and S.

Klein, which were fancy, middle class, and so down market it doesn't exist anymore, respectively.

And he asked as many employees as possible, without arousing suspicion, where to find something he knew was on the fourth floor.

To get them to say, fourth floor.

Then he'd be like, what?

To get them to speak in a more careful, more consciously monitored tone.

Did I mention he also came up with the idea of the sociolinguistic monitor, which is how much careful attention we're paying to our speech.

And he found that pronunciation of R varied by department store, despite the fact that everybody had ostensibly the same education, socioeconomic status, and so on.

More on this later.

100

So within the same population of people, in theory, you still see an awareness of social factors in the city where the fancier stores had more R in their pronunciations.

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And this was a change in progress happening across the city, but visible in this teeny tiny microcosm when you have rapid anonymous interactions that are ostensibly below the level of conscious awareness,

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where people aren't carefully monitoring their speech.

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That's basically how his department store study is often portrayed, especially in Introduction to Linguistics or Intro to Sociolinguistics classes,

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as though what he found was that within the same community, individuals made an unconscious calculation

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and on the aggregate accommodated the perceived prestige of their store's clientele

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and spontaneous probabilistic interactions that percolate up to an aggregate that mirrors the city as a whole, including a change in the culture of the city that was sort of in progress.

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Honestly, that's probably a charitable reading because most introductions are just a paragraph

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that say that he found that social factors affect how individuals choose to speak, like whether or not they say are in fourth floor.

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Problem is, nearly every part of this is wrong.

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From our understanding of what he actually did in terms of operationalizing the study, to our idea of what population was even sampled, to, well, the results that he found.

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And people keep reproducing the study to great fanfare with similar findings and all the same conceptual flaws.

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I'm not saying that Bill's findings, or even our understanding of them, is necessarily wrong in the sort of platonic realm of the true,

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but what I'm saying is that we haven't actually ever tested that or demonstrated it empirically.

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Instead, LeBeauve and everybody else has kind of done a different study entirely.

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Bear with me here.

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So there's a lot of problems with the study and with our understanding of it.

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Recognize that this is coming from a place of respect and love.

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If you're a sociolinguist, take a deep breath, maybe sit down before watching the rest.

119

The first problem is

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that pronunciation of R in New York City was not actually below the level of conscious awareness then or now.

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He even discusses the changes in explicit discussion of R in public schools in a long footnote.

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On Martha's Vineyard, the pronunciation of the vowel in night was actually arguably below the level of conscious awareness.

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Not R in New York.

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It was already by the 1950s what we might now call inregistered, a feature people are aware of and make conscious reference to or use to construct identity.

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The same can be said of other features in the New York accent like saying Toyty Toyd Street.

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And in the original department store study, Bill specifically discusses the realization of th as ta, as in Fort Floor.

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I mean, hell, the Rat Pack was making jokes about it on screen the same year the department store study was published.

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I think there's something wrong with his throat.

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I told him that six weeks ago.

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I'll have a lot more to say about R not being below the level of consciousness in a minute, so buckle up, linguists.

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A related issue is that his later work on dialects, from The Logic of Non -Centered English to Language in the Inner city inform how we read the department store study,

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but there's no indication in the text itself, especially the first version of it, that he fully thought of Black English as a separate ethnolect,

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or Yiddish English, or Puerto Rican English, or whatever else.

134

That all came a decade later.

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So the full sample of 264 observations doesn't separate out different ethnolects at first, and in the first version of the paper, he's just starting to formulate his ideas about race.

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He takes one moment and separates out Black informants, we don't really use that word anymore, and notes that at S.

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Klein, they were 94 % R -less, and at Saks, they were nowhere to be found.

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There's a lot going on here that I'll get to shortly, but leave me a comment if you can think of a few confounds around race in 1962.

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Hint, what happened in 1964?

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What happened in 1974?

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More importantly, with the rapid anonymous survey, he breaks out the, quote, native New York white saleswomen for a subsample of 141 to really make his point, but two pages later states,

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and I quote, it is true

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that we do not know a great deal about the informants that we would like to know, their birthplace, language history, education, participation in New York culture, and so on.

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So he's just kind of going on vibes.

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It's also entirely possible to approximate that with, say, the 1960s census and Macy's own data, which they regularly published in glossy magazines,

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and do a little light Bayesian reasoning to update your priors.

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And here's the thing, I don't think everybody was a native New Yorker

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because I have my own biases based on my own experiences moving to New York and working in retail.

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Not to mention tons of family and extended family who are New Yorkers going back to the 19th century.

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My experience in retail was that there were tons of transplants.

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That might have been a difference in 2007 compared to 1962.

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Thanks Bloomberg with your Disneyfication of New York.

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But still, it's always been a city with a large population churn

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and while the state was definitely losing people in the 1960s, I'm not so sure the city as a whole was, although Harlem in particular was, but that's also related to white flight.

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And of course, that's a result of the ongoing Great Migration.

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You know, that thing where hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners fled to the north

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and then were segregated into completely different neighborhoods and school districts? That thing.

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On top of the fact that not a single coworker of mine for five years in retail was a native New Yorker, the closest were a few Bronx Dominicans, if you know, you know,

159

there was also a huge emphasis on how we spoke to the customers.

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And that wasn't just my experience.

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I know people who worked retail in the 1970s and even worked in department stores like Nordstrom.

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I'm told they were actively seeking actors.

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They placed a huge emphasis on being, quote, well -spoken, and how well -spoken you were determined which counters and even which floors you worked on.

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Perfume?

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Well, let's just say you better not call it perfume and hope to work at that counter.

166

So Labov's finding that the higher floors of Saks, for instance, had more R -full pronunciation.

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Not only is this likely not a fact of spontaneous speech production below the level of consciousness,

168

but it may have been both actively trained by management and even selected for in hiring.

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I wrote to the leading department store historian, because that's a real thing and his work is super interesting,

170

and he told me that there was absolutely ongoing coaching on how to talk to the customer as early as the 1930s, and that Macy's might have been up to 42 % transplants.

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Of course, there's also the confound that there's a massive ramp up in hiring temporary seasonal part -time employees in, oh, I don't know, November.

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He also informed me that there was a strong assumption that the shopper was female even through the 1960s.

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So a man with an educated New Jersey accent

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and a trench coat and a freaking briefcase was in its very nature not something that would trigger unmonitored speech.

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If anything, it's possible he was assumed to be corporate, doing a spot check of the sales floor.

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By the way, about the suitcase, he claims repeatedly in the paper that he took impressionistic notes, but it's an open secret in linguistics that he actually used a tape recorder in a suitcase,

177

like a damn John le Carré character.

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This both lends support to his specific claims about our pronunciation, and also would create IRB problems if the modern IRB had fully existed at that point.

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But it didn't, and in those days, they were still giving black men syphilis for science.

180

That's because the study was carried out two years before the Civil Rights Act was passed.

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Is that what you guessed for 1964?

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So his seeming astonishment

183

that there were no black employees on the sales floor of SACS kind of falls flat in this context.

184

Quoting Michael Lissicke, the department store historian again, by 1962, black employees were not common on the sales floor even in NYC and certainly not at SACS.

185

He goes on to write that black Manhattanites would frequently go to Abraham and Strauss in Brooklyn because, quote, it was worth the trip to feel welcomed.

186

If you've never traveled from Harlem to downtown Brooklyn, let me tell you from experience, it's got to be something very important to make you do that.

187

Now, situating things in the context of the Great Migration, the arfulness of Sachs and the arlessness of S.

188

Klein correlated strongly with the number of Black employees, seems like it could have to do with, well, the stigma of Black speech.

189

Gerard van Herck makes a similar argument in the fantastic paper Fear of a Black Phenology, where he basically demonstrates, through quantitative research,

190

that we cannot rule out the Great Migration as a trigger for the northern city's val shift,

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as the established white locals differentiated themselves in their speech from the influx of black newcomers.

192

All of this brings me to my main argument.

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Bill LeBove's department store study is not really about the probabilistic

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behavior of the individual being affected by larger social forces such that, on the aggregate, positive social orientation towards, say, class aspiration or mobility percolate up,

195

and you get a pattern reflective of the direction of the city as a whole and unconscious passing interactions.

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Say that five times fast.

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Say that five times.

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Can't even do that.

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Instead, Bill Above inadvertently did a study of employment discrimination.

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I'll say it again.

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The department store study, regardless what we want it to be, is actually a study of employment discrimination.

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It still shows the effect of the social on individual linguistic behavior at the level of the sociolinguistic variable, and it even still shows the value of the rapid anonymous survey,

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despite the many flaws there and the complete lack of Bayesian inference or whatever, or the lack of statistical power.

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But the point is not to nitpick those little things.

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The point is that it is neither individual nor unconscious, and therefore not something percolating up to aggregate behavior, but rather it's more than likely top -down conscious policy.

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It is structural.

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It is structural racism, among other things.

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Literally employment discrimination based on accent.

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He even talks about how at Sax, the foreign accent in speech was Western European, but at S.

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Klein, it was Jewish.

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This is not inconsistent, by the way, with Lebov's overall oeuvre.

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In fact, dialect perception was a huge part of his later work, and I'm sure my ideas about it are largely shaped by his writings in The Principles of Linguistic Change.

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But it's a radical departure from how his study was initially received and how it's still taught and discussed.

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I'm 100 % certain Bill would be interested in pursuing these lines of inquiry

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and I'm deeply sad this isn't a conversation that I could have had with him.

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Honestly, I can see in my mind's eye his excited reaction to a new idea

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or a new way of looking at something he'd been investigating for damn near 60 years.

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We're coming up on almost a year after his passing and I miss him more than ever.

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My hope would be for sociolinguists to engage with these criticisms sincerely and honestly, to reproduce his study taking factors like unconscious and conscious bias,

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things that were not yet a concept in academia when he did the study the first time, into account, along with hiring policy

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and smart statistical approaches to both having sufficient statistical power

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and a reasonable Bayesian posterior over the probability that you're even sampling the population you think you're sampling from.

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We have the benefit of hindsight reading the original study, not just in terms of understanding different ethnolexes,

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different adjacent systems, but also knowing that Bill was performing his experiment at the height of the Great Migration, the beginning of white flight,

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and the end of institutional segregation.

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Although fair housing wasn't until 1974, so pat yourself on the back if you said the Fair Housing Act when I said 1974.

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Anyway, if you like what I'm doing with the channel, you can support it on YouTube with super thanks or over on Patreon at patreon .com slash languagejones.

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Please leave a comment.

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They're great for the algorithm and subscribe if you haven't already.

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If you want more in -depth linguistic content like this, definitely let me know.

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And if you're using my publications or YouTube videos to teach in your classroom, please let me know that.

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I love hearing from all of you.

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Until next time, happy learning.

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149 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 233 sentences and 3727 words to shadow. The speech runs for 19:14. The speaker talks fast, about 194 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 80% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
linguistic adjective	/lɪŋˈɡwɪstɪk/	Of or relating to language.
variable adjective	[ˈvæɹ.i.ə.bl̩]	Able to vary or be varied.
pronunciation noun	/pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/	The formal or informal way in which a word is made to sound when spoken.
conscious adjective	/ˈkɑn.ʃəs/	Alert, awake; with one's mental faculties active.
rapid adjective	/ˈɹæp.ɪd/	Very swift or quick.
anonymous adjective	/əˈnɒn.ə.məs/	Lacking a name; not named, for example an animal not assigned to any species .
aggregate noun	/ˈæɡ.ɹɪ.ɡət/	A mass, assemblage, or sum of particulars; something consisting of elements but considered as a whole.
prestige noun	/pɹɛsˈtiːd͡ʒ/	The quality of how good the reputation of something or someone is, how favourably something or someone is regarded.
awareness noun	/əˈwɛɹ.nəs/	The state or level of consciousness where sense data can be confirmed by an observer.
ton noun	/tʌn/	The short ton of 2000 pounds (about 907 kg), 20 hundredweights of 100 pounds avoirdupois each.
accent noun	/ækˈsɛnt/	A higher-pitched or stronger (louder or longer) articulation of a particular syllable of a word or phrase in order to distinguish it from the others or to…
variation noun	/ˌvɛəɹiˈeɪʃn̩/	The act of varying; a partial change in the form, position, state, or qualities of a thing.
unconscious adjective	/ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/	Not awake; having no awareness (usually as the result of a head injury).
hire verb	/ˈhaɪɹ/	To obtain the services of in return for fixed payment.
monitor noun	/ˈmɑ.nɪ.tɚ/	Someone who watches over something; a person in charge of something or someone.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
come up with verb		To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it.
sit down verb		To assume a sitting position from a standing position.
break out verb		To escape, especially forcefully or defiantly.
carry out verb	/ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/	To hold while moving it out.
go back to verb		To stem from; to originate in.
go over verb		To look at carefully; to scrutinize; to analyze.
rule out verb		To cross an item out by drawing a straight line through it, as with a ruler.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 50 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, don't, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: throat /ˈθɹoʊt/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: pronunciation /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, variation /ˌvɛəɹiˈeɪʃn̩/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/, discrimination /dɪskɹɪmɪˈneɪʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: pronunciation /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/, anonymous /əˈnɒn.ə.məs/, discrimination /dɪskɹɪmɪˈneɪʃən/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/, statistical /stəˈtɪs.tɪ.kəl/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like linguistic, variable, pronunciation.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	isn't just indebted · was asked · be proven
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	People who all · City, which was · community, which can
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've ever met · have read · have introduced

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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