Aspects of the Acoustic Analysis of Imitation Betsy Evans, University of Washington 1. Introduction This chapter explores the analysis of imitation, an area of sociolinguistic research that has received little attention, largely due to an assumption that speakers can “perform” only gross stereotypical characteristics of other varieties. However, results from the study of imitation in other subfields of linguistics, especially forensic linguistics, indicate that sociolinguists should consider imitation more seriously. An exploration of existing acoustic research on imitation will be presented in order to establish the current state of this kind of research and target future directions this field could take. Firstly, it is useful to clarify here what is meant by imitation. For the purposes of this chapter, imitation refers to the conscious use of a variety that is not the speaker’s usual vernacular. Some might call such speech activities “performance,” “style,” “imitation,” or even “metaphoric shift.” This difficulty in defining what imitation is probably contributes to imitation not being taken seriously as a topic of research. In addition, definitions of imitation often suit the purpose of the research. However, more importantly, imitation has received little attention from sociolinguists due to the prominence in sociolinguistics of the “vernacular principle” (Labov 1972:112). Much time and effort have been devoted to developing methods of data collection/interviewing that avoid the observer’s paradox so that we can study the “vernacular” (see Milroy and