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——在接触到另一个人的语言之后——还是在长期内，因为周围社区的语言结构发生了变化。个体与语言变异的互动如何受到用于解决环境竞争的一般认知策略的影响？在双重机制框架中，认知控制——用于解决冲突和调节预期的机制——被分为两种相互关联的策略：主动控制和被动控制。研究1通过在实验室中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分布变化的适应。主动和被动控制策略较少的习惯性参与被假设为促进语音变化的整合。然后，研究2将相同的行为任务转化为一项基于社区的研究，该研究在更大范围内检查语言变化：正在进行的声音变化（例如，“等待”听起来更像“小麦”）。本论文通过收集波多黎各费城人（波多黎各以外最大的社区之一）的社会语言学访谈，补充了关于费城声音变化的现有知识。根据人口构成（黑人和白人费城人的比例），从两个年龄组和两个社区群体中收集访谈，以记录一个人如何？直接社区影响参与三个社会分层的声音变化正在进行中。然后，同样的参与者完成了研究1中的三个行为任务（AX-CPT，一个修改的Stroop范式，和一个带诱饵的n-back任务），允许对控制策略如何调节他们对进展中的变化的采用进行回归分析。这是第一个明确地将认知控制的双重机制与语言加工联系起来的研究之一。它的独特之处在于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，记录未被充分研究的人群的讲话，并提供社会和认知因素如何在语言使用中相互作用的统一说明。

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.