Chapter 8 returns to a focus on methods in sociophonetics, considering the ways that sociophonetics has been and can be integrated with corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and natural language processing. The chapter considers the turn towards “big data” across the social and hard sciences and the ways that technological improvements and software developments (both for data analysis and data acquisition) have fueled the development of sociophonetics and paved the way for rapid methodological advancements and substantive breakthroughs. In its treatment, the chapter surveys the present state-of-the-art (e.g. forced alignment, automatic formant extraction) and upcoming developments, and weighs the pros and cons of these new approaches. In doing this, it provides a thorough treatment of some less often discussed methodological concerns underlying the present and future of the field.

Chapter 5 moves beyond regional accents to the importance of speech sound patterns for speakers’ presentations of their affiliations and for listeners’ interpretations of others. The chapter considers what sociophonetics offers the understanding of language and the social world and outlines some of the fundamental ways that the major social categories of social class, gender, ethnicity and age impact phonetic variation and change. Taking each of these topics in turn, the chapter unpacks how sociolinguistic studies of socially driven variation have established a foundation that underpins contemporary sociophonetic research and then transitions to survey sociophonetic research that investigates the influence of these four social factors on speech production. The chapter then turns to the role of these factors in speech processing, providing an overview of how factors such as class, gender and ethnicity have been shown to affect how listeners process variation in speech. The chapter closes with a discussion of how such research has contributed greatly to our understanding of how social factors correlate with linguistic factors.

Chapter 2 focuses on methodological concerns within sociophonetics. The chapter presents an overview of phonetic methods as they relate to sociophonetic inquiry and highlights key points of departure in the methodological approach to and analysis of sociophonetic data. It begins with a general overview of the key concepts and approaches from both phonetics and sociolinguistics, and also discusses some of the major methods by which sociophonetic research is undertaken. The investigation of two kinds of segmental features, vowels and sibilants, is emphasized in order to explicate many of the central methods. The chapter draws from some of the foundational sociolinguistic as well as more recent experimental studies to connect methodological approaches in phonetics to growing research interests in examining social factors. As well, the chapter delves into not just acoustic but also auditory approaches, looking at how research on speech processing is an increasingly important part of the sociophonetic landscape. As we end the chapter, we provide an overview of some of the methods used in recent sociophonetic work on speech perception.

Chapter 3 continues the focus on methodological concerns, outlining and demonstrating how typical acoustic analyses proceeds from fieldwork to acoustic measurements and data extraction to analysis. This treatment goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of "doing" sociophonetics, with more hand’s on procedures for the identification, processing and measurement of vowels and sibilants This chapter is intended to introduce readers to and provide the work flow for some basic analyses using common software. The survey of key methods and fundamental terms presented in this and the previous chapter provides a foundation for reading and understanding the approaches used in sociophonetic literature and in exploring the research presented in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 1 begins with the key question, “What is sociophonetics and why should we care about it?” In response, the chapter introduces the field of sociophonetics, situating it within the framework of approaches to language in sociolinguistics and phonetics, but also as clearly aligned with work in allied fields such as computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and phonology. Along these lines, the chapter broadly surveys the foundational developments for the field and considers the promise of this newly emergent field. The chapter also highlights the core aims of the volume, which include a focus on its promise for research on both speech production and speech processing.

Chapter 9 closes the book by considering the general contributions of sociophonetics and its role bringing together disparate fields such as sociolinguistics, phonetics, cognitive science and psycholinguistics. It recaps the main themes of the previous chapters and revisits the current strengths and weaknesses of the field with an eye toward envisioning the sociophonetics of the future and how it will benefit from greater conversation with allied fields.

Chapter 6 moves from the focus of Chapter 5 on macro level social categories to examine approaches to the study of within-individual variation and the construction of linguistic style and social identity. In particular, the chapter turns to what sociophonetic research, given its ability to examine gradient phonetic shifts, brings to this pursuit. The chapter begins by considering the study of individual variation in linguistics and phonetics more generally and then moves to discuss early approaches to sociolinguistic style and how those approaches evolved to present day interests in language and identity, style and interaction, within the realm of what is referred to as "third wave" research. Focusing in on such third wave approaches, the chapter then examines how sociophonetic studies on sibilant variation have provided an opportunity to explore both the social and cognitive aspects of socio-indexical variation. Finally, the chapter turns to what sociophonetic research, given its ability to hone in on very particular aspects of phonetic features, can bring to the study of linguistic performance, attending to studies that examine sibilant variation and speech perception.

Chapter 4 examines how the traditional field of regional dialectology evolved toward and contributed to modern sociophonetic pursuits, considering what advances increasingly sociophonetic approaches have allowed. Looking at how geographic space impacts dialect, the discussion considers how recent work, such as the Atlas of North American English, incorporates sociophonetic measures to better capture and explain the features that comprise and contribute to the spread of regional varieties. The chapter surveys recent research taking a sociophonetic perspective to the study of regional variation. In particular, it hones in on how sociophonetic approaches to the study of vowel variation has reshaped the way regional dialects are measured and defined. Finally, work examining the role of phonetic features in how listeners process and recognize regional dialects is considered in some depth.

Chapter 7 reviews the major theories of sound change that have emerged over the past centuries, honing in on more modern user-based theories most synergistic with sociophonetics. The chapter examines how sociophonetics, and its growth from work in sociolinguistics, has redirected the focus on sound change from a historical and system internal perspective to one forged by and crucially interconnected with the social needs of its users. Along these lines, the discussion emphasizes the empirical approach to the "problems" of sound change articulated in the foundational work by Weinreich, Herzog and Labov in 1968. Turning to recent research that explores these "problems" from a sociophonetic perspective, the treatment suggests that sociophonetics does not just continue a tradition of interest in sound change, it provides new opportunity to understand at a more fine-grained level than ever before the mechanisms underlying language change.