Cognitive Mechanisms in the Perception of Sociolinguistic Variation

In our increasingly multicultural and multilingual world, an understanding of how we perceive language, dialects, and linguistic variation and the relationship these features have to language attitude, plays an increasingly important role in shaping social behavior and policy. This study, situated at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, uses multiple methodologies to investigate how individual speaker/listener differences influence the perception of linguistic variation and the social attitudes it engenders.;The present study recorded participants' event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate how and when information indexed by sociolinguistic variation is integrated during sentence processing. In a series of electrophysiological and behavioral experiments, participants listened to speech that varied in (ING) realization (working/workin'). In ERP experiment ;In experiment ;Taken together, the results of these experiments suggest that listeners have fine-grained representations of sociolinguistic and dialectal variation that are recruited during real-time language processing in order to help predict which variable word form a speaker is likely to utter. Importantly, these cognitive processes are further modulated by listener gender, with females showing particular sensitivity to sociolinguistic and dialectal norms. This work provides compelling neural evidence that the cognitive mechanisms that support language comprehension are dependent on what is said, how it is said, who says it, and who hears it.