Further interdisciplinary opportunities

Abstract This chapter rounds out the argument that phonetics and phonology can benefit from deeper engagement with sociophonetic methods and theory, via discussion of three further areas involving facets of intraspeaker variation: recording context effects, speech accommodation, and second dialect acquisition. In the first case, the chapter describes how the concept of performativity in sociolinguistics transforms how we ask about the ecological validity of “lab speech.” In the second case, there is already an established cross-fertilization between phonology, phonetics, and sociolinguistics, so some next steps are proposed; it is argued that research on divergence is particularly promising, as is consideration of sociolinguistic theory in studies of Clear Speech and X-Directed Speech styles (e.g., Infant-Directed Speech). The chapter ends with a consideration of how second dialect acquisition research sheds light on the complexity and malleability of phonological representations and processes, and provides data to test and develop different theoretical accounts of those processes.