The advent of Early Modern Dutch (starting ∼1550) marked significant developments in language use in the Netherlands. Examples include the loss of the case marking system, the loss of negative particles and the introduction of new vocabulary. These developments typically lead to a lot of variation both within and between language users. Linguistics research aims to characterize and account for ...

The lexical items like and well can serve as discourse markers (DMs), but can also play numerous other roles, such as verb or adverb. Identifying the occurrences that function as DMs is an important step for language understanding by computers. In this study, automatic classifiers using lexical, prosodic/positional and sociolinguistic features are trained over transcribed dialogues, manually an...

This paper addresses issues related to the elicitation and encoding of demographic, situational and attitudinal metadata for sociolinguistic research with an eye toward standardization to facilitate data sharing. The discussion results from a series of workshops that have recently taken place at the NWAV and LSA conferences. These discussions have focused principally on the granularity of the m...

Does knowledge of sociolinguistic variation influence how we perceive and understand speech coming from different kinds of people? A series of experiments investigated whether listeners have knowledge about t/d deletion, a sociolinguistic variable, and, if so, whether this knowledge influences their language comprehension. Experiment 1 investigated listeners’ knowledge of the social correlates ...

A pair of experiments addressed two questions regarding listeners’ sociolinguistic knowledge: First, how do listeners use facts about speech to inform their beliefs about speakers? Second, and conversely, how might listeners use facts about speakers to inform their perceptions of speech? Results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that listeners can infer characteristics of speakers from their use of a...

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of ”computational sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL r...