Language varies: within speakers, across speakers, and over time. Sociolinguists are interested in accurately describing this variation and understanding the linguistic, social-attitudinal, and developmental factors that underlie it. Variationist sociolinguists take an explicitly quantitative approach to this study, using large datasets to uncover the constraints on variation in and across different communities. Many variationists investigate how languages as community systems change over time. Others focus on how the speech of individual people varies across contexts, and how this variation is used to express identity, convey attitudes, or otherwise do social work in interaction. Increasingly, scholars are also interested in what the study of variation can tell us about language as a cognitive system: how are linguistic structures represented and processed in the minds of speakers, and how are linguistic representations linked to social meaning?

These questions drive my own work in sociophonetics, a field of research which shows how nuances of pronunciation are used both by speakers to convey social information and by listeners to draw conclusions about the social identity of their interlocutors. Sociophoneticians also address questions of phonetic and phonological theory, using speech production and perception data to inform accounts of how sounds and words are learned, represented, processed, and linked to social information.

Second Dialect Acquisition

When someone moves to a new region, (how) do they change their accent? What can these changes tell us about language and the people who use it? My own work suggests that accent changes occur primarily at the word level, with fine-grained lexical and phonetic patterning that is best accounted for within a theory that includes phonetically rich underlying representations. Relatedly, I've found that mobile people who are exposed to a new (for them) cot/caught contrast may produce a phonetic distinction between those word classeswhile apparently failing to recognize a more abstract contrast between them (in fact, metalinguistic awareness of the contrast doesn't seem to correlate at all with whether someone actually produces the distinction in their conversational speech).

Mobile people don't just absorb new dialect forms, however: my research has also indicated that speakers learn new links between dialect forms and social meaning, and use both their native and new accent features to convey stance and complex place identity.

I’m currently working on various analyses from the data collected as part of my NSF-supported project, Second Dialect Acquisition and Stylistic Variation in Mobile Speakers. A subset of this data has been made available through the Corpora of Mobile Speakers!

Research Methods in Sociophonetics

Several of my collaborative projects involve comparing or developing ways of dealing with data at various stages of collection and analysis. Shannon Mooney and I have developed a novel game-based task for studying vowel convergence between speakers. Paul De Decker and I have examined how different audio compression formats affect acoustic vowel measurements, and have used ultrasound imaging alongside acoustic measurements to show how different articulatory strategies may underlie essentially the same acoustic signal, even within a community.

Once we have our measurements, we must then decide what they mean: how large are the observed differences between groups, and are they significant? Lauren Hall-Lew and I have compared and evaluated several methods for quantifying vowel difference, work which has supported our individual research projects in vowel merger and distinction as well as those of the wider sociophonetics community. I've also worked on a project with Yoojin Kang that examines communication via Zoom; you can view our NWAV presentation based on part of this work here.