When someone moves to a new region, (how) do they change their accent? What can these changes tell us about language and the people who use it? My own work suggests that accent changes occur primarily at the word level, with fine-grained lexical and phonetic patterning that is best accounted for within a theory that includes phonetically rich underlying representations. Relatedly, I've found that mobile people who are exposed to a new (for them) cot/caught contrast may produce a phonetic distinction between those word classes while apparently failing to recognize a more abstract contrast between them (in fact, metalinguistic awareness of the contrast doesn't seem to correlate at all with whether someone actually produces the distinction in their conversational speech).
Mobile people don't just absorb new dialect forms, however: my research has also indicated that speakers learn new links between dialect forms and social meaning, and use both their native and new accent features to convey stance and complex place identity.
I’m currently working on various analyses from the data collected as part of my NSF-supported project, Second Dialect Acquisition and Stylistic Variation in Mobile Speakers. A subset of this data has been made available through the Corpora of Mobile Speakers!