Cognitive characteristics of the leaders of language change

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this research project is to deepen our understanding of how dialect features spread across social groups. A person's accent often provides clues about their identity, such where they grew up or how old they are. A regional accent can also influence whether a person is perceived as well-educated, friendly, ignorant, or stuck-up, meaning accents have real consequences in people's lives. Linguists have learned a lot about how accent features spread across social groups through cities and regions, eventually turning into new languages entirely. But the questions of how accent changes get started in the first place and then spread from person to person remain unanswered. Whose accent catches on? Who picks up features of other people's speech? This project looks at several ongoing changes in the Philadelphia accent with the goal of identifying what types of people drive these changes forward. The Philadelphia accent is one of the best-studied accents in the world thanks to research done in the city since the 1970s, allowing for comparison to older forms of the accent. In this project researchers record casual conversations between pairs of Philadelphian friends and conduct acoustic analysis of their speech in order to identify individuals who have particularly innovative Philly accents. The same participants then complete a series of experiments and surveys that provide data about their information processing style, linguistic awareness and flexibility, and personality. These participant traits are then correlated with the speech data in order to test hypotheses about what kinds of people are at the forefront of language change. The results will not only provide a very fine-grained picture of how language changes over time, but also bring new evidence to bear on the feedback loop between the characteristics of the human mind and properties of human social behavior in groups.