ABSTRACT
While sociophonetics has been argued to have its roots in phonetics and variationist sociolinguistics, developments in this field reflect its indebtedness to psycholinguistics as well as its contributions to that field. The experimental techniques of psycholinguistics have contributed to the methodologies of sociophonetics. At the same time, psycholinguists have become critically aware of the pitfalls of assuming homogeneity amongst speakers and of the necessities of examining individual and social variation. A case study illustrates the application of psycholinguistic methodology in addressing sensitivity to phonetic variation in one variable as a signal of the speaker’s possible dialect and how this influences interpretation of further phonetic variables.
