Dynamic sociolinguistic processing: Real-time changes in judgments of speaker competence

Social category information plays a central role in speech perception and processing. To date, research on this topic has struggled to model how social category perceptions evolve over the time course of an interaction. In this article, we build on recent methodological developments to investigate trajectories of listener perceptions, focusing on how impressions change as linguistic, social and contextual details emerge. We base our arguments on an analysis of listeners’ real-time evaluations of the perceived competence of speakers of two British regional accents during a mock interview for a job in a law firm. Results indicate a need to move away from the view, predominant in sociolinguistics, of category perception as a discrete phenomenon toward a model of perception as inference under uncertainty. We discuss implications for theories of sociolinguistic cognition and for understandings of accent bias.