This study examines the effect of explicit awareness (or, noticing) of socially-indexed variation on the generation of social inferences during speech perception. In a matched-guise task, French listeners associated sentences that contained optional liaisona sociolinguistic variable at the level of stereotype in French-more frequently with 'formal language' than with 'everyday language'. This effect was larger for participants who reported noticing the optional liaisons than for participants who did not. These results demonstrate that while noticing variation in context is not a necessary condition for social inferences to be generated, language users' subjective experience of socially-conditioned variation influences the frequency with which social inferences arise, which may ultimately lead to individual differences in the representation of the same socially-indexed variation.