Sociolinguistic Cognition

In this course, we will explore how language meets social information in the mind. We will address questions like: How do we infer who someone is from the way that they speak? How do our social expectations influence speech perception? How do our social experiences, stereotypes, and attitudes mediate how we speak and how we listen? How does our knowledge of linguistic variation interact with cognitive processes like attention and memory? And how much control do we have over these phenomena? Students will gain both a theoretical understanding of research in these areas as well as practical knowledge related to formulating research questions and designing studies on sociolinguistic topics.