Does Social Information Influence Sentence Processing? Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Does knowledge of sociolinguistic variation influence how we perceive and understand speech coming from different kinds of people? A series of experiments investigated whether listeners have knowledge about t/d deletion, a sociolinguistic variable, and, if so, whether this knowledge influences their language comprehension. Experiment 1 investigated listeners’ knowledge of the social correlates of t/d deletion. Experiment 2 investigated whether social information listeners gather from the non-linguistic context is used in formulating expectations about sentence meanings. Results indicate that listeners have implicit knowledge about t/d deletion, and they use this information in resolving ambiguity, suggesting that social information is a part of language understanding, and should be included in models of language processing.