Doctoral Dissertation Research:The long and short of linguistic variation:Dual mechanisms of cognitive control in processing phonological variation and the adoption of sound change

语言使用者很容易适应语言的变化，无论是在短期内-暴露于另一个人的讲话后-还是在长期内，随着周围社区的语言结构的变化。如何是一个人的互动与语言变异的一般认知策略，用来解决环境中的竞争的影响？在一个双重机制的框架中，认知控制--解决冲突和调节期望的机制--被分为两个相互关联的策略：主动控制和被动控制。研究1探讨了这些控制策略如何影响个体适应语音输入的分布变化，使用实验室模拟声音的变化。主动和被动控制策略的习惯性参与较少，这被假设为促进语音变异的整合。然后，研究2将相同的行为任务翻译到一个基于社区的研究中，在更大的范围内研究语言变化：声音变化（如“等待”听起来更像“小麦”）。本文通过收集对波多黎各之外最大的社区之一的波多黎各费城人的社会语言学访谈，补充了有关费城声音变化的现有知识。采访收集了两个年龄组和两个社区组的基础上人口构成（黑人和白色费城人的比例），以记录如何一个？的直接社区影响参与三个社会分层健全的变化进行中。同样的参与者，然后完成三个行为的任务，从研究1（AX-CPT，修改Stroop范式，和一个n-back任务与诱惑），允许回归分析控制策略如何调节他们采用的变化进行中。它是独特的，在应用这些策略都在实验室模拟声音变化和现实世界中的声音变化在社区中，记录了一个未充分研究的人口的讲话，并提供了一个统一的帐户，社会和认知因素如何在语言使用中相互作用。

Language users readily adapt to linguistic variation, both in the short term -- after exposure to another's speech -- and in the long term as linguistic structures change in the surrounding community. How is an individual's interaction with linguistic variation influenced by the general cognitive strategies used to resolve competition in the environment? In a dual mechanisms framework, cognitive control -- the mechanisms engaged to resolve conflict and regulate expectations -- is divided into two interrelated strategies: proactive and reactive control. Study 1 examines how those control strategies influence individual adaptation to distributional changes in speech input, using an experiment simulating sound change in the laboratory. Less habitual engagement of proactive and reactive control strategies is hypothesized to facilitate the integration of phonological variation. Study 2 then translates the same behavioral tasks to the field in a community-based study examining language variation on a larger scale: sound changes-in-progress (as when 'wait' sounds more like 'wheat'). This dissertation complements existing knowledge regarding sound change in Philadelphia by collecting sociolinguistic interviews of Puerto Rican Philadelphians, one of the largest communities outside of Puerto Rico. Interviews are collected from two age groups and two neighborhood groups based on demographic makeup (proportion of Black and White Philadelphians) to document how one?s immediate community influences participation in three socially-stratified sound changes-in-progress. The same participants then complete the three behavioral tasks from Study 1 (AX-CPT, a modified Stroop paradigm, and an n-back task with lures), permitting a regression analysis of how control strategies modulate their adoption of changes-in-progress.This is one of the first studies to explicitly link dual mechanisms of cognitive control to language processing. It is unique in applying these strategies both to simulated sound change in the laboratory and real-world sound change in the community, documenting the speech of an understudied population and providing a unified account of how social and cognitive factors interact in language use.