Research seminars are weekly talks given at the department of Semiotics, Aarhus. The title and abstract for this particular talk were as follows: The long and winding road from production data to the psychological reality of linguistic variation In 2005 the Copenhagen LANCHART Centre was established as a research centre focussing on language change in real time. In the lecture I will give some background and present some of the results leading to a take on what the relationship between comprehension and production seems to be (like) when you take linguistic variation as your main topic. The statistically treatable variation in production is demonstrated on the level of the Danish speech community, at the level of 'minimal groups' at the various sites in Denmark and at the level of the individual, leading to generalizations as to the determining character of speaker variables such as class, age and gender. This is contrasted to the stereotypical nature of perception and the questions for discussion will then be what the role of cognition might be in both production and comprehension.