Cognitive characteristics of the leaders of language change

语言变革领导者的认知特征

• 批准号: 1627972
• 负责人: Meredith Tamminga
• 金额: $ 12.64万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-08-15 至 2020-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1627972&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Cognitive; characteristics; leaders; language; change

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.

该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。一个人的口音通常提供有关其身份的线索，例如他们在哪里长大或年龄。区域口音还会影响一个人是否被认为是受过良好教育，友好，无知或卡住的，这意味着口音会影响人们的生活。语言学家了解了很多关于重音特征如何通过城市和地区跨社会群体传播的知识，最终完全变成了新语言。但是，关于重音变化如何首先开始的问题，然后从人到人之间传播。谁的口音抓住了？谁掌握了他人演讲的功能？该项目着眼于费城口音的一些持续变化，目的是确定哪些类型的人会推动这些变化的发展。由于1970年代以来，费城口音是世界上研究最佳的口音之一，可以与较旧形式的口音进行比较。在这个项目中，研究人员记录了费城朋友对之间的随意对话，并对他们的演讲进行声学分析，以识别具有特别创新的Philly口音的个人。然后，同一参与者完成了一系列实验和调查，以提供有关其信息处理方式，语言意识和灵活性以及个性的数据。然后将这些参与者的特征与语音数据相关联，以便测试哪些人在语言变化的最前沿。结果不仅将提供非常细粒度的图片，说明语言如何随着时间的流逝而变化，而且还为人类思想的特征与人类社会行为的特征之间的反馈循环带来了新的证据。