Research
Broadly speaking, my research links three areas of linguistic research – second language acquisition, variationist sociolinguistics, and dialect acquisition – by looking at sociolinguistic variation within the acquisition of L2 phonology. Although I am interested in any L2 community in any urban setting, the majority of my work thus far looks 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 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. My research aims to find out the extent of, and reasons behind this acquisition by analysing the speech of the Polish community in Manchester.
So far, four linguistic features have been identified as worthy of investigation: the STRUT vowel, glottal variation in /t/, -ing variation, and h-dropping. The first three of these all showed considerable variation in the speech of the participants (h-dropping was almost non-existent) and a number of social factors have been explored in attempting to explain the differing degrees of acquisition. Those social factors appearing to play a part in shaping the acquisition include gender, identity, attitude, motivation, and context of L2 use.
Linguistic factors have also been explored, and some predictable patterns relating to preceding following sound have been found in relation to the consonantal features. The influence of frequency has also been looked at, and while lexical frequency appears to have no effect, there is an intriguing pattern of a possible frequency effect at the level of phonetic voicing with regard to the STRUT vowel. This is now being explored further in relation to a usage-based framework.