Children's speech, community diversity and the emergence of sound change

This project aims to explain how children's speech processing adapts to cultural and linguistic diversity and how such adaptation may seed sound change in language. Using rigorous acoustic and articulatory (ultrasound) methods, the project intends to explain how children rapidly and authentically acquire the intricately nuanced accents of their communities. One of the major goals is to advance theories of language variation and change by providing new insights into the forces that shape the sounds of language. An understanding of how children's speech patterns develop and ultimately converge to local norms has implications for the social integration of second language learning children, refugee/asylum seekers, and clinical populations.