Language Change Across the Lifespan

在国家科学基金会的支持下，Gillian Sankoff博士将进行为期两年的语言研究，探讨社区语言变化与个人语言稳定之间的关系。这个项目利用桑科夫博士和她的同事在1971年至1995年间录制的一系列独特的录音，调查了一个讲法语的社区中的语言变化。原始语料库包括120名讲法语的蒙特勒人的录音带和成绩单，按年龄、性别和社会阶层分层。其中一半的演讲者是在1984年重新录制的，其中一部分人在1995年被跟踪。该项目将确定社区一级的趋势，并评估个人演讲者寿命的稳定程度。由于演讲已经被收集和转录，研究活动将侧重于对说话者的语音、语法和词汇进行量化分析。八个不同的特征将被用来跟踪这些语言子系统的不同延展性。例如，人们可能比修改童年口音更容易修改语法。这项社会语言学研究将提炼语言学习的“关键时期”的概念。这是青春期前的成熟期，儿童在这一时期掌握他们的母语。对于大多数人来说，基本的语言知识在一生中形成了一个相对稳定的系统。尽管人们在一生中都在学习新词汇，但大多数50或60岁的人都忠实于他们小时候第一次学习的语言的语音系统和语法。然而，语言在不断变化。为了解释这两种情况是如何发生的，早期的语言变化模型侧重于语言信息从成人到儿童的传递。由于最近的研究表明，儿童非常接近地模拟成人的系统，所以人们在以后的生活中一定有可能在某种程度上重塑他们的语言。这项关于这种可能性的研究还探讨了语言变化如何影响交流，即使是在同一个语言社区内的几代人之间。了解说话者一生中经历的语言变化将有助于解决人们在随后的变化影响交流时如何以及为什么改变他们的语言的谜题。该项目还将解决可能性的限制，研究成年后遇到新语言或方言的人在晚年生活中语言重塑的障碍。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Gillian Sankoff will conduct two years of linguistic research on how language change at the community level relates to stability at the individual level. This project investigates linguistic change in a community of French speakers, taking advantage of a unique series of tape recordings made between 1971 and 1995 by Dr. Sankoff and her colleagues. The original corpus consists of tapes and transcripts of 120 native French-speaking Montrealers, stratified by age, sex, and social class. Half of the speakers were re-recorded in 1984, and a subset of those were followed through 1995. The project will establish trends at the community level and assess the degree of stability across individual speaker lifespans. Since the speech has already been collected and transcribed, research activities will emphasize quantitative analyses of phonetics, grammar, and lexicon across speakers. Eight different features will be used to track differential malleability of these linguistic subsystems. For example, people might modify their grammars more readily than they do their childhood accents. This sociolinguistic research will refine the concept of a "critical period" for language learning. This is the maturational period before puberty when children acquire their native languages. For most people, basic linguistic knowledge forms a relatively stable system throughout life. Although people learn new vocabulary across their lifespan, most 50- or 60-year olds prove faithful to the sound system and grammar of the language they first learned as young children. And yet, languages are constantly changing. To account for how both situations can hold, earlier models of language change focused on the transmission of linguistic information from adults to children. Since recent research has shown that children model the adult system very closely, it must be possible for people to remodel their language - to some extent - later in life. This research on that possibility also addresses how language change affects communication, even across generations within the same speech community. Understanding language change as experienced by speakers across their lifespans will help to solve the puzzle of how and why people alter their speech, when the ensuing changes affect communication. The project will also address the limits of the possible, in examining the barriers to linguistic remodeling in later life for people who encounter new languages or dialects as adults