Second Dialect Acquisition and Stylistic Variation in Mobile Speakers

Georgetown University, Washington DC

Investigators

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.