Annette D'Onofrio is a sociolinguist broadly interested in how phonetic features play into the ways that we understand and create the social world around us. She is particularly interested in how we use social information to understand spoken language, and how we use linguistic styles to form ideas about who other people are, both consciously and automatically. In her research, D'Onofrio aims to connect a) what we know about the use of linguistic variation as a socially meaningful resource in interactions with b) what we know about how speech is perceived at automatic and controlled levels. This allows her to think about how linguistic styles are represented cognitively, and how they're connected with social constructs like personae. Much of her work has focused on vowels involved in regional variation in the United States. In one line of work, through the National Science Foundation-funded Chicagoland Language Project, D'Onofrio and her students are conducting fieldwork in Chicago and surrounding areas in collaboration with Dr. Sharese King. Their goal is to better understand how Chicagoans use language, and how language use is connected to the diversity of lived experiences in the area.