NEB – Networks, Exemplars and Bilinguals. The potential of quantitative social network analysis in sociophonetic research is a project aimed at exploring how social interactions with other people influence our way of speaking. The focus of the project is concerned with one of the crucial questions in language sciences: how does social experience affect human speech communication? Speakers are constantly updating their sound system to make it more similar to the speech of the ambient community. Likewise, bilinguals experience pronunciation changes in both languages as a result of a differential use of the two languages.

The main aim of NEB is to study the effects of personal network structure on bilingual’s linguistic behavior, focusing on how social experience counts as essential structuring force to phonological categories. In order to explore this issues, we will analyze spontaneous data coming from a sample of bilingual speakers from Bolzano.