The cognition of dialect variation: evaluating the relationship to bilingualism

In recent decades, there have been considerable advances in the area of bilingual cognition, but research on cognition across dialects remains limited. Here, we consider how the intuitive link between these experiences of linguistic diversity could drive empirical and theoretical work on the cognitive basis of dialect production. We begin with descriptive evidence to motivate contrasting hypotheses: the Difference Threshold Hypothesis, which argues for a qualitative difference between bilingual and bidialectal cognition; and the Linguistic Continuum Hypothesis, which argues that bidialectalism and bilingualism represent the same phenomenon across different degrees of linguistic overlap. To differentiate these hypotheses at the level of individual cognition, we argue that (1) research must expand beyond the lexical level to consider phonological and morphosyntactic differences across codes and (2) extra consideration is warranted for cases of bilingualism with apparent dense code-switching, which more closely approximates “bidialectal” practices.