Doctoral Dissertation Research: Production, Perception, and Acquisition of New Dialect Features by Speakers Moving Between Two Regions

当说不同方言的人相互交流时，他们特定的方言特征可能会随着时间的推移而改变。这种变化的动机可能是由于许多相互关联的发展、语言和社会因素。本博士论文改进研究资助项目将研究在两个地区之间迁移的流动人口的新方言习得情况，一个地区是城市，其方言享有盛名，另一个地区是农村，其方言被污名化。与语言接触的研究相比，方言接触的研究很少，但这些研究为广泛理解语言变化的过程和接触情境的结果提供了关键机会。这项研究将为人们如何能够学习和使用新的语言形式以及语音和单词如何在大脑中呈现提供新的知识。每个地区参与者的语言样本将根据性别、年龄和在新地区的居住时间收集。这些以及其他社会特征，如出生年龄、教育水平、职业、社会网络和语言态度，将被研究它们对方言习得的可能影响。每个移动演讲者将参加四项活动：会话访谈，阅读句子列表，单词和最小配对。重要的是，本研究通过对参与者的家乡成长经历和移居新地区的经历进行访谈，可以研究参与者如何根据不同的主题改变他们的演讲。采访的转录和相关的音频文件将最终形成语料库的基础，这将与其他对第二方言习得和研究语言变化感兴趣的研究人员共享。这个语料库也将有价值的相关目的，如司法语言学。最后，通过观察第一方言和第二方言特征的使用情况，本研究将探讨说话者如何使用语言特征来制作与身份相关的含义。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

When speakers of different dialects interact, their specific dialect features may change over time. The motivation for such changes can be due to many interrelated developmental, linguistic and social factors. This doctoral dissertation improvement research grant-funded project will investigate new dialect acquisition by mobile people relocating between two regions, one urban and characterized by a prestigious dialect, and one rural, whose dialect is stigmatized. Studies of dialect contact have been rare in comparison to studies of language contact, but such studies provide key opportunities to understand the processes of language change and the outcomes of contact situations broadly. This study will contribute new knowledge about how people are capable of learning and using new language forms and how speech sounds and words are represented in the mind. Language samples from participants in each region will be collected according to gender, age, and length of residence in the new region. These and other social characteristics such as age of arrival, education level, occupation, social network, and language attitude will be examined for their possible effects on dialect acquisition. Each mobile speaker will take part in four activities: a conversational interview, reading a list of sentences, words, and minimal pairs. Importantly, by having an interview about the participants' experience growing up in their hometown and their experience in moving to a new region, this study can examine how participants vary their speech according to different topics. Transcriptions of interviews and associated audio files will ultimately form the basis of a corpus which will be shared with other researchers who are interested in the study of second dialect acquisition and variation within the studied language. This corpus will also be of value for related purposes, such as for forensic linguistics. Finally, by observing how both first dialect and second dialect features are used, this study will examine how speakers use linguistic features to craft identity-related meanings.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.