11th - 13th April 2011 - University of Chester, UK

Introduction

The issue of variation in the speech signal is becoming increasingly influential in paradigms of language processing which have, hitherto, largely assumed an idealised speaker-hearer as the source and receiver of the signal.  Insights from variationist sociolinguistic studies of (mainly) speech production, for example, have demonstrated that structured variation is an inherent property of language performance and the most recent work in sociophonetics has underlined the importance of building variation into adequate models of both speech production and perception. A common theme underlying much work carried within the sociophonetic paradigm is that notion that linguistic and social information are processed in similar ways.  This forms part of the wider sociolinguistic concern as to the nature, representation and processing of social meaning.  Innovative methodologies, including those drawn from experimental psychology, are now being exploited by variationist sociolinguists to better understand the complexities of the relationship between language variation, change and social meaning. Equally, the burgeoning field of experimental pragmatics places at its heart an experimental approach to the the relationship between language and meaning. 

VaLP 2011 aims to offer an opportunity for linguists and others to present research on the interface between linguistic variation, at all levels of the grammar, and language processing.  The conference further aims to act as the catalyst for the launch of an international network of scholars working at the interfaces of their linguistic sub-disciplines, bringing together sociolinguists, psycholinguists and experimental pragmaticians, as well as other linguists, psychologists and cognitive scientists working on the relationship between linguistic variation, in its widest sense, and language processing.