Style-Shifting: Audience Design in Speech

Sociolinguistic variation is not just about which dialect a person speaks — it's about how the same speaker moves between variants from one sentence to the next. This 3D simulator models that moment-to-moment "style-shifting": a logistic choice model, grounded in Labov's attention-to-speech work and Bell's audience-design theory, computes a live probability of using a standard versus a vernacular word variant from three context sliders (setting formality, addressee status, social distance) and one personal trait (prestige-consciousness). Each simulated utterance is a genuine weighted random draw that travels between a speaker and listener node in the 3D scene, colour-coded by variant and logged into a rolling history strip, while live readouts track the instantaneous probability and the rolling standard-usage rate.