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，无论是在接触了他人的语言之后的短期内，还是随着周围社区语言结构的变化而长期地适应。个体与语言变异的互动如何被用来解决环境中的竞争的一般认知策略所影响？在双重机制框架中，认知控制--参与解决冲突和调节预期的机制--被分为两种相互关联的策略：主动控制和反应控制。研究1通过在实验室模拟声音变化的实验，考察了这些控制策略如何影响个体对语音输入的分布变化的适应。较少的主动和反应性控制策略的习惯性参与被假设为促进语音变异的整合。然后，研究2将同样的行为任务翻译到现场，在一项基于社区的研究中，考察了更大规模的语言差异：声音正在进行中的变化(比如当‘等待’听起来更像‘小麦’时)。这篇论文通过收集对波多黎各费城人的社会语言学访谈，补充了关于费城声音变化的现有知识，波多黎各是波多黎各以外最大的社区之一。访谈来自两个年龄组和两个社区组，基于人口构成(费城黑人和白人的比例)，以记录一个S直接社区如何影响人们参与正在进行的三个社会分层的声音变化。然后，相同的参与者完成研究1中的三个行为任务(AX-CPT，一种改进的Stroop范式，以及一个带有诱饵的n-back任务)，允许对控制策略如何调节他们对进程中变化的采用进行回归分析。这是第一个明确将认知控制的双重机制与语言加工联系起来的研究之一。将这些策略应用于实验室中的模拟声音变化和社区中真实世界的声音变化方面是独一无二的，它记录了未被研究的人群的言语，并提供了关于社会和认知因素在语言使用中如何相互作用的统一描述。

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.