Doctoral Dissertation Research: High school choice and the social meanings of a sound change in language

该奖项全部或部分由《2021年美国救援计划法案》（公法117-2）资助。理解语言变化是如何以及为什么发生的是理解人类语言本质的核心。最近一项针对成年人的研究发现，一个人上的高中类型会影响这个人与地方相关的语言特征（比如地区口音）的联系。然而，尽管青少年经常引领语言变化，高中选择的影响在高中生本身中仍未得到充分研究。这个博士论文项目建立在之前的工作基础上，研究了目前在美国英语中发生的一个重要的区域语音变化，通过研究青少年对正在发生变化的特征的社会联系如何与他们自己对这些特征的使用相关，以及不同类型学校的社会环境如何影响与这些和其他区域语言特征相关的社会意义。除了培养一名博士生外，研究结果还将与参与者和社区成员公开分享。本项目通过对不同类型高中的青少年进行社会语言学访谈、社会评价任务和感知方言任务，对高中生赋予一组特定地域口音特征的社会意义提供了新的、更深入的见解。探索青少年对语言特征的社会意义的理解如何与他们在学校的社会环境以及他们的地位、种族化和阶级认同相关联，将反过来增强我们对语言变化过程中起作用的社会和语言机制的理解。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。

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Understanding how and why language change occurs is central to understanding the nature of human language. Recent work among adults has found that the type of high school an individual attends can influence how that person engages with place-linked linguistic features (such as regional accents). However, although adolescents often lead linguistic change, the impacts of high school choice remain under-examined among high school students themselves. This doctoral dissertation project builds upon previous work on an important regional sound change currently occurring in American English by examining how the social associations adolescents attribute to the features undergoing change relate to their own use of these features and how the social environments within different types of schools might influence the social meanings that are associated with these and other regional linguistic features. In addition to the training of a doctoral student, results will be shared publicly with participants and community members. Through sociolinguistic interviews, social evaluation tasks, and perceptual dialectology tasks with adolescents in different types of high schools, this project provides new and deeper insights into the social meanings that high school students attribute to a specific set of regional accent features. The exploration of how adolescents' own understandings of the social meanings of linguistic features relate to their social environments in school and their placed, racialized, and classed identities will in turn enhance our understanding of the mechanisms – both social and linguistic – at work during the course of language changes.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.