Second dialect acquisition after regional migration in England
For my PhD project, I examined how migration influences the acquisition of phonetic variation. I was interested in how speakers who have moved from the North West to the South of England change their accent, and their knowledge of sociolinguistic features. I was particularly interested in how sociolinguistic awareness, identity and individual differences in cognitive ability influence this process. To explore these questions, I conducted a longitudinal study with first year undergraduate students who have moved to the South of England for university. I also conducted two larger sample online studies, examining the effects of attention and migration in accent categorisation, and also how migration influence regional identity as measured through an implicit association test.
You can read my thesis here.
I also co-authored a paper on lifespan change, and adult acquisition of phonological variation at ICPhS 2023, which you can read here.
Measuring pupil size in response to accented speech
Working with Scott Kunkel, Rémi Lamarque and Adam Chong, we have been interested in using changes in pupil dilation as a measure of cognitive effort, when listening to speech produced in different accents. We exposed 60 Southern British English speakers to sentences in their own accent, American English, Glaswegian English and Chinese-accented English, to examine how accent familiarity affects pupil size. You can read about the results of this study in Language and Speech here.
Alongside Ruohan Guo, we are now conducting a follow-up experiment which aims to directly test how visual social information can influence cognitive load as measured through pupil dilation. An OSF repository outlining our plans can be found here.
Individual differences in sociophonetic perception
For this project, I was interested in how individual differences in cognitive processing style influences the perception of changes in progress. To do this, I examined how speaker and listener factors influenced the perception of DRESS-lowering and GOOSE-fronting in Southern British English, and considered autistic-like traits as a measure of cognitive processing style. We found that listeners' integration of audiovisual information was affected by their cognitive processing style, as was their overall interpretation of the changes-in-progress.
A manuscript can be shared upon request.
Variation in Scots
Over the past few years, I have been working with Jennifer Smith at the University of Glasgow on the Speak for Yersel and Caregivers, Children and Language Change projects.
Speak for Yersel is a large-scale resource for studying variation in Scots. In this role, I have been helping to process and analyse phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical variation collected from across Scotland. As part of this project, I have co-authored a paper to be published in a peer-reviewed volume by Cambridge University Press (Smith, Robinson, Barnard & Aitken, forthcoming). I also contributed to creating versions of Speak for Yersel for Wales and the Republic of Ireland.
As part of the Caregivers, Children and Language Change project, we have been investigating how sociolinguistic variation is transmitted to children by caregivers, before those children's speech begins to resemble and advance community norms, as they reach adolescence.