About Sociolinguistic Cognition

The fundamental goal of the study of sociolinguistic cognition is to characterize the computational stages, cognitive representations, and neural correlates underlying the perception, production, and storage of sociolinguistic variation. Work in this newly emerging field has focused on three primary issues: (1) understanding the manner and degree to which social knowledge, beliefs, and stereotypes influences perceptual processing of spoken language; (2) identifying and characterizing the cognitive stages, representations, and time course of real-time processing of sociolinguistic variation; and (3) characterizing the way in which language and language variants engender attitudes and in turn, the way in which attitudes bias language processing. As a specialization within the cognitive sciences, researchers of sociolinguistic cognition use a wide array of techniques and methods adopted from various disciplines including social psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. Some of the more common methods include eye tracking, event-related brain potentials, and chronometric measures.


The Sociolinguistic Cognition Blog is a place to keep abreast of new trends and research in this nascent field. It is an open forum for exploring the advantages and limitations of various experimental methods in sociolinguistic cognition. It is a place for discussing new results and new directions. In order to foster an open dialog among this small, but growing population of researchers, we encourage you to post your reactions, comments, and criticisms. If you would like to become a contributor (even if just occasionally), please contact the site administrators Brandon Loudermilk or Chris Stewart.