Catching Accents: How We Learn and Use New Dialect Features

Ever notice your accent change? Or a friend who sounds different after moving or hanging out with new friends? They’re not faking it–we sometimes change how we speak without even trying. This talk explores the ability to catch new accents–starting from when we are tiny babies learning our first dialect–and what this tells us about language and the mind.

Talk for the Language Science Fair at Planet Word

Mobile people, mobile vowels: What accent changes can tell us about the linguistic system, and how to study them

Dialects on the Move: What second dialect acquisition can reveal about people. vowel systems, and change over the lifespan

Shifting Accents and Evolving Competence: What Second Dialect Acquisition Reveals about the (Socio)linguistic System

Remote control: a discussion of participant variability in web-based research (talk with Yoojin Kang)

Satellite session schedule

Differences without distinctions, and distinctions with little difference: COT/CAUGHT vowels among mobile speakers in New York City and Toronto.

Link to talk information

Dialects on the Move: What Second Dialect Acquisition Can Reveal About People, Vowel Systems, and Change Over the Lifespan

Dialects on the Move: What Accent Change in Mobile Speakers Can Reveal About People, Phonology, and the Lexicon

What Do We Mean by Structure?: Mobile Speakers and the (Non-)Coherence of Chain Shifts (talk)

Conference site

Transnational Mobility and Accent Change: Theoretical & Methodological Opportunities for Sociophonetics 

Conference site

Variable vowel convergence in a novel cooperative task (poster with Shannon Mooney)

Variable vowel convergence in a cooperative task (poster with Shannon Mooney)

Style in a second dialect: Topic- and stance-based variation among mobile speakers

https://lsa.umich.edu/linguistics/news-events/all-events.detail.html/41730-9446508.html