ABSTRACT
Experiments, alone or in combination with other methods of data gathering, are growing in popularity among sociolinguists because they can provide different kinds of data that contribute to our understanding of social variation in language use. Carefully designed production experiments allow us to efficiently collect large quantities of speech that directly bear on our research questions. Complementary data from perception experiments provide concrete evidence for how social variation in speech is perceived and interpreted by non-linguists. Although many experiments rely on highly constrained forms of speech, such as read words or sentences, more natural production and perception data can be obtained through the use of interactive tasks that both constrain linguistic content and allow participants to converse more naturally.
