Speakers take advantage of phonetic details to make social deductions about others, but they also use social information to form expectations about how people are likely to speak. I study the cognitive mechanisms that make these interrelated processes possible. I’m also broadly interested in the sociolinguistic construction of identity. In particular I study the separation or lack thereof between automatic processes in communicative accommodation and the proactive choices speakers make to carve out a sense of self using shared linguistic resources. My current work focuses on how mismatches between social information and the acoustic signal inhibit or facilitate language processing.