Innovative Approaches to Research in Hispanic Linguistics

There is growing interest in using experimental perception tasks to study the sociolinguistic competence of second language learners. Previous studies on L2 attitudes and perception have largely focused on single linguistic variants presented in guises with limited social context. This chapter reports on a study that explores the L2 sociolinguistic perception of stylistic variation in Spanish. L2 learner participants (n = 108) completed a matched-guise task in which they evaluated digitally mani