Mutual engagement between psycholinguistic and variationist sociolinguistic research is important: work to date shows quite different outcomes from these approaches. This chapter illustrates that, in general, heritage speakers maintain the grammatical structures and vocabulary of homeland varieties, in contradiction to widely held beliefs that language quickly “degrades” or is “bastardized” in immigrant communities, and in contradiction to many published studies about heritage languages. However, both approaches converge on finding change in one phonetic pattern in some of the languages analyzed. In this chapter, the potential sources of this apparent contradiction are explored, considering differences related to population, sample, methods of data collection, analysis, and predictors. This allows us to better understand whether, for example, reported “deficits” among heritage language speakers might be partly due to a deficit in test-taking and experience with formal contexts in the heritage language. It closes with a proposal for more coordinated work across methods.

This chapter provides an overview of research that combines phonetics and psycholinguistics. It underscores a number of papers that highlight a story about the history, issues and trends in the field. In doing so, papers that can serve as good pointers to different subfields are examined. The chapter oscillates between foundational work and more recent work, hoping that it can provide a broad introduction to this area of research. This chapter particularly focuses on issues that merge phonetic variation, spoken word recognition, memory, and sociolinguistics. Research in this area has not only raised questions about the assumptions made about how listeners understand spoken language, but is also ripe for investigations that have a broad impact across psychology and linguistics more generally.

The chapter discusses the indexical field in the light of results from a series of listener-experiments. It is a well-established finding that the same linguistic variant may be associated with different indexical features. In three studies focusing primarily on the social meanings associated with fronted (s) in different styles of Copenhagen Danish, we have used the matched-guise technique to investigate how the social meaning ascribed by listeners to a specific linguistic variant is influenced by (1) the prosodic context in which it occurs, (2) the co-occurrence of other segmental features in the stream of speech, and (3) the gender of the speaker. The three experiments illustrate different aspects of the indexicality of fronted (s) in Copenhagen Danish, and they are designed to highlight how different social meanings are evoked, and how the indexicalities of different features influence each other. We show how ascription of indexical value to linguistic variation is a dynamic process, and we argue that the concept of the indexical field can help us understand the way meaning-making takes place, not only in experiments like these, but also in everyday interaction.