research
Broadly speaking, my research links two areas of linguistic research – SLA and variationist sociolinguistics – by looking at sociolinguistic variation within the acquisition of L2 phonology. More specifically, it is looking into the effect of features of the local accent on the English pronunciation of native Polish speakers living in Manchester. Methodologically, the research draws on techniques from sociophonetics including acoustic analysis of vowels using Praat, and statistical analysis using Rbrul.
Common sense and personal experience tell us that people who move to an area in which people speak with a different dialect often show signs of acquiring features of that dialect, including the accent itself. Various second dialect acquisition studies have supported this hypothesis, providing fascinating insights into the process behind this acquisition. However, these studies have almost exclusively looked at two dialects from within the same first language, and not at the possibility of second language dialect acquisition. Again, common sense and personal experience tell us that this does indeed happen, that non-native speakers of English do in fact often acquire features of the local accent, despite it perhaps being a non-standard variety (in relation to any pedagogical model they may have been exposed to). Yet this acquisition is not a foregone conclusion for every person, neither is it complete. Through my research I aim to find out the extent of, and reasons behind this acquisition by analysing the speech the Polish community in Manchester.
Working hypotheses are that length of residence, type of exposure, motivation, attitude, level of English, gender and identity all play a part in the extent to which regional features of pronunciation are apparent in L2 speech; while factors such as lexical frequency, lexical simplicity and semantic importance may play a part in determining the distribution of acquired features.
Background research involves investigating areas such as sociolinguistic variation, dialect acquisition, the relationship between perception and production, the causes of foreign accent in L2 speech, the effect of L1 on L2 and the concept of interlangauge phonology, the role of motivation in SLA, and of course the features of the regional accent.
It is gradually becoming clear that different features are influenced by different factors, with length of residence appearing (unsurprisingly) to be consistently significant. However, this provides only part of the story, as gender and attitude are proving to be equally important.