Sociolinguistic Variation in Word Recognition

Course Description

In this seminar, we will approach the socio/psycholinguistic interface by reading a slice of the psycholinguistics literature through a sociolinguistic lens. Specifically, we will look at experimental work on how phonetic and phonological variation impacts spoken word recognition. We will ask questions like:

• What kinds of variable phenomena are and are not represented in this literature, and what might we expect if we applied these methods to other kinds of variable phenomena?
• How is social information brought to bear on the word recognition process? What might this tell us about the connection between social and linguistic representations?
• How can investigating the role of variation in word recognition enrich our understanding of both sociolinguistic variation and language change?
• What social expectations do participants bring to experimental contexts, and what (if anything) can we do to shift those expectations?

Students will be assumed to have familiarity with basic topics in phonetics, phonology, and sociolinguistics. Although we will consider some methodological and experimental design issues as relevant, this is not a methods course; our primary class activity will be reading discussions.

Area Tags: Sociolinguistics, Variation, Perception, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Science

Instructor: Meredith Tamminga