Sound change research at the IPS
Sound change can cause what were once mutually intelligible accents to diverge into different unintelligible languages. But the mechanisms in human speech processing and interaction that contribute to this type of divergence are poorly understood. It is to this area that the current ERC project called "Human interaction and the evolution of spoken accent" plans to make a main contribution.
We are interested in how accents evolve through interactions between speakers, and how accents themselves contribute to language diversification. The goal is to develop a computational model that can predict how random interactions between individuals can give rise to group-specific accents. In order to construct and constrain the model, we will analyze how children's accents develop when they are in schools in relatively isolated communities with a homogeneous accent compared with those in an urban setting and with a mixture of accents. In addition, we will look at what happens to accents in groups that spend months at a time in areas remote from their normal surroundings – such as researchers who spend the winter in Antarctica. The resulting agent-based computer model will elucidate how dialects and accents evolve through interactions between individual members of language communities, and how spoken accents when they become isolated from each other can give rise to languages with markedly different sound patterns. The project will also trace the long-term impact of increased migration on language change and diversification.
The overall aim is to predict the direction in which spoken accent evolves, given a population of interacting speakers. Our research includes:
- Longitudinal analysis in primary-school children (Bavaria and Albania)
- Longitudinal analysis in adults when isolated from the rest of the world for a prolonged period of time (Antarctica)
- Analysis of two groups of adult speakers from different dialects that come into contact with each other (AE and BE)
On this website you can also find information on further current and completed projects at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing which investigate sound change.
