| NSF Org: |
BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 6, 2017 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 6, 2017 |
| Award Number: | 1651108 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Jorge Valdes Kroff
jvaldesk@nsf.gov (703)292-7920 BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2017 |
| End Date: | February 28, 2023 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $217,477.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $217,477.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
MAIN CAMPUS WASHINGTON DC US 20057 (202)625-0100 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
DC US 20057-1789 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Linguistics |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
How do people change their accents after moving to new regions? Mobile people typically acquire some, but not all, of a new region's dialect features; this project will investigate the developmental, social, and linguistic factors determining what kinds of changes occur, and the ways in which mobile speakers vary their use of accent features to achieve social goals in conversation. This research will help us understand how words and speech sounds are represented in the mind as well as the flexibility of language over the lifespan.
The results of this project, the largest study of second dialect acquisition to date, will have several practical applications. Understanding how accents vary and change over a lifetime is crucial for improving language- and dialect-teaching pedagogy as well as speech-recognition and speech-generating technologies. Knowing how mobile speakers are likely to change their accents can aid forensic and intelligence investigations involving speaker profiling or judging authenticity in cases of possible voice disguise. Finally, improved awareness of how speech varies and how this variation is used by everyone to communicate is key to stemming language-based prejudice and discrimination.
The researcher will interview eighty native speakers of English: forty natives of Toronto, Canada, who relocated as adults to New York City, and forty natives of New York City who relocated as adults to Toronto. Both speaker samples will be stratified by gender, age of arrival in their new region, and number of years living in the new region. Each mobile speaker will participate in activities along with a friend who is a lifelong resident of the migrant's current city, including a conversational interview and a series of reading and judgment tasks. Activities will be audio-recorded, enabling the researcher to compare spontaneous and read speech as well as speech associated with different topics and expressed attitudes. Four vowel variables which distinguish the two cities will be analyzed using appropriate phonetic and statistical methods. The results of this analysis will be used to evaluate existing claims and generate new hypotheses about mobility-induced dialect change and to determine how patterns of variation reflect the social and attitudinal content of speech.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
People often change the way they speak after moving to a new region. Casual observers may say that these speakers have "acquired an accent", but accents are not adopted or avoided as monoliths: studies of dialect change among mobile speakers indicate that specific dialect or accent features are altered depending on a range of linguistic, social, and developmental factors. By observing the patterning of multiple dialect features within a given speaker or group of speakers, such studies can generate hypotheses about the extent to which grammatical competence can change as a result of exposure to a new dialect, as well as whether mobile speakers can acquire social competence in a new dialect, in the sense of replicating patterns of variation found in the new region and using this variation to achieve communicative ends.
This project contributes to our understanding of how people learn the features of new dialects by collecting speech data from 70 mobile participants, including 40 natives of Toronto, Ontario now living in New York City and 30 natives of New York City currently living in Toronto. Each person participated in an interview and other tasks which enabled the investigators to examine how they produce specific vowel sounds and to analyze various factors influencing how these sounds are produced. Overall, the researchers found that adults who move to new region show stability in their accents, though some features may change on a word-by-word basis. Moreover, the extent of this change depends on how participants think about their place identity, and the types of comments they make about their new and old homes in the context of the interview. These findings will help linguists develop better theories of how words and sounds are represented in the mind, and how these representations can evolve over the lifespan.
The data from this project has also provided the foundation for a Corpora of Mobile Speakers, which will be made available to other researchers who are interested in learning about second dialect acquisition, and which we aim to grow over the coming years with contributions from other studies of language change by mobile individuals.
Last Modified: 06/13/2023
Modified by: Jennifer Nycz
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