Cognitive characteristics of the leaders of language change

这项研究的目的是加深我们对方言特征如何在社会群体中传播的理解。一个人的口音往往能提供关于他们身份的线索，比如他们在哪里长大或多大。一个地区的口音也会影响一个人是否被认为是受过良好教育的、友好的、无知的或傲慢的，这意味着口音对人们的生活有真正的影响。语言学家对口音特征如何通过城市和地区在社会群体中传播，最终转变为完全新的语言，已经了解了很多。但口音变化最初是如何开始的，然后在人与人之间传播，这些问题仍然没有答案。谁的口音很流行？是谁摘取了别人演讲的特点？这个项目着眼于费城口音正在发生的几个变化，目的是确定哪些类型的人推动了这些变化。费城口音是世界上研究最多的口音之一，这要归功于自20世纪70年代以来在该市进行的研究，这使得人们可以将费城口音与较老的口音进行比较。在这个项目中，研究人员记录了一对费城朋友之间的随意对话，并对他们的语音进行了声学分析，以识别拥有特别创新的费城口音的人。然后，相同的参与者完成一系列实验和调查，提供关于他们的信息处理风格、语言意识和灵活性以及个性的数据。然后，这些参与者的特征与语音数据相关联，以检验关于哪种人处于语言变化前沿的假设。这些结果不仅将提供语言如何随时间变化的非常精细的图景，而且还将为人类思维特征和群体中人类社会行为特性之间的反馈回路提供新的证据。

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.