Key research themes
1. How do speakers cognitively perceive, evaluate, and socially interpret dialectal variation within their speech communities?
This research theme focuses on individuals' mental representations of dialect boundaries, linguistic distinctiveness, and social attitudes towards dialect varieties. It matters for understanding language identity construction, sociolinguistic salience, language change dynamics, and linguistic self and group awareness. Perceptual dialectology methods (e.g., draw-a-map tasks, speaker evaluations, and surveys of dialect labels) reveal folk linguistic knowledge, stereotypes, and language ideologies underpinning social and linguistic perceptions of dialects.
2. What are the cognitive and linguistic mechanisms underpinning perceptual dialectal intuitions and judgments?
This theme explores the psycholinguistic and cognitive foundations of intuitive judgments elicited by dialectal and linguistic input, including how stereotype-driven automatic inferences and linguistic processing shape folk dialect knowledge. Understanding these mechanisms informs the epistemic status of folk linguistic intuitions and their reliability or susceptibility to cognitive illusions, thereby clarifying how people construct linguistic stereotypes and dialect perceptions.
3. How do social attitudes, identity constructs, and evaluative categories interact with folk linguistic conceptions in diverse dialectal contexts?
This theme investigates the relationship between social identities, language ideologies, and evaluative linguistic metaconcepts (such as dialect labels or prestige markers). It considers how mutable social and cultural factors influence folk perceptions of dialects and their symbolic meanings, including the stability and contestation of dialect labels across geographic and social spaces. These dynamics are crucial for understanding language standardization pressures, dialect levelling, and the socio-cognitive construction of dialect prestige or stigma.