LSLT: Charlotte Vaughn (LSC)

Charlotte will be presenting remotely, but we will have an in-person audience at the Language Science Center in addition to Zoom.

Listener knowledge about sociolinguistic variation

Decades of studies have described robust constraints that predict when speakers are likely to use different variants of linguistic features. This talk explores the extent to which listeners are sensitive to those kinds of conditioning constraints, asking about the specificity and utility of listeners’ expectations about patterns of language variation. I do this by discussing a series of behavioral studies that investigate one well-described sociolinguistic feature in American English, variable (ING), i.e., talking vs. talkin’. Results indicate that listeners show sensitivity to the grammatical conditioning constraints on (ING) variation, but use this information in ways most relevant to the task at hand. These findings inform our understanding of the processing and representation of variable language forms. This work invites a closer dialogue between sociolinguistics and other areas of language inquiry interested in cognition.