The fundamental goal of the study of sociolinguistic cognition is to characterize the computational stages and cognitive representations underlying the perception and production of sociolinguistic variation. This chapter discusses psycholinguistic approaches in four sections. The first section discusses different methods for examining how dialectal variation is represented, perceived, and learned. The second section reviews studies investigating the role of sociolinguistic stereotypes in speech processing. The third section explores the attitudinal aspects of language variation by presenting two recent studies using innovative variations of the matched-guise technique. It concludes by introducing the implicit association test, which may be able to address some of the limitations of alternative methods. The fourth section reports on studies that use eye tracking and event-related brain potentials to investigate sociolinguistic cognition.