Linguistics Colloquium

Meredith Tamminga is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also received her PhD in 2014. She directs the Language Variation and Cognition Lab, working on topics at the intersection of sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. She is currently serving as Graduate Chair at Penn and as an Associate Editor at Glossa Psycholinguistics.

Title
From the interview to the lab (and back?): Sociolinguistic variant priming across methodologies

Abstract
Ten years ago, I gave a colloquium talk at UMich that included a corpus-based study of variant priming in the sociolinguistic variable ING (e.g. workin’ ~ working). In the decade since, my lab has taken ING as a testing ground for a number of experimental approaches to variant priming. In this talk, I’ll share what we’ve learned from these approaches, with a view to understanding a) how the different experimental paradigms relate to each other, and b) how the experimental evidence compares to the evidence from conversational speech. I’ll conclude with some thoughts on more general prospects for unifying laboratory-based and naturalistic methods in the study of language variation.

This event will be hybrid held in East Hall 4448 & Zoom.