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

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.