Cognitive characteristics of the leaders of language change

这个研究项目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身份的线索，比如他在哪里长大，年龄多大。地方口音也会影响一个人是否被视为受过良好教育、友好、无知或自大，这意味着口音对人们的生活有实际影响。关于口音特征如何在城市和地区的社会群体中传播，最终演变成全新的语言，语言学家已经了解了很多。但是口音变化是如何开始的，然后在人与人之间传播的问题仍然没有答案。谁的口音流行起来了？谁会模仿别人说话的特点？这个项目着眼于费城口音的几个正在发生的变化，目的是确定哪些类型的人推动了这些变化。费城口音是世界上被研究得最好的口音之一，这要归功于自20世纪70年代以来在这座城市进行的研究，可以与早期的口音进行比较。在这个项目中，研究人员记录了费城朋友之间的随意对话，并对他们的讲话进行声学分析，以识别具有特别创新的费城口音的人。然后，同样的参与者完成了一系列的实验和调查，这些实验和调查提供了关于他们的信息处理方式、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言数据相关联，以检验关于哪种人处于语言变化的前沿的假设。研究结果不仅提供了语言如何随时间变化的精细图景，而且还为人类思维特征和群体中人类社会行为属性之间的反馈循环提供了新的证据。

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.