Longitudinal analysis of language across the life-span (LALL)

• Applicant: Professorin Isabelle Buchstaller, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 418602718

The LALL project aims to address a key empirical and theoretical gap in the language sciences: Age-related malleability in the individual speaker. Whereas research in psychology and the cognitive sciences has accrued an increasing body of evidence for changes across the life-span in terms of brain plasticity, personality and behavioural patterns, work on the linguistic life course remains biased towards the younger age brackets. As a result, the middle and later life stages remain severely under-researched, and the linguistic effects of aging are much less understood. What is notably lacking is an informed dialogue about the dynamic relationship between maturation and language use across the life of the individual and thus about the basic drivers underlying linguistic variation and change. The LALL project proposes to fill these gaps, breaking new ground in two ways: (i) Empirically: by building the globally most comprehensive corpus for analysing longitudinal linguistic changes over the adult lifespan. LALL will expand an existing panel corpus into a three/four wave data-set consisting of sociolinguistic recordings paired with cutting-edge biometric and psycho-social testing methods. Similar to large-scale survey instruments in medicine and the social sciences, LALL follows a dynamic sample of socially stratified individuals as they move through the entire adult life-course, providing nuanced, temporally equidistant data-points on the linguistic effects of aging. Combining unprecedented time-depth with pertinent density of measurements at regular time points and a suite of cutting-edge testing instruments puts the LALL project in the unique position to add hitherto unknown detail to the analysis of adult intra-speaker malleability. (ii) Theoretically: by integrating the rich set of results that this one-of-a-kind panel dataset offers and operationalizing it as a comprehensive starting point for analysing intra-speaker lability across the adult life-course. To this effect, the project team will convene an advisory board of experts across the language sciences and allied fields who have agreed to engage in a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue about the relevance of the findings gleaned from LALL for our models of aging, maturation and diachronic language change. In summary, the major contribution of LALL lies in the combination of empirical and theoretical innovation. Our novel longitudinal panel corpus triangulates fine-grained temporal detail with novel metadata, opening up pioneering perspectives on the role of maturational effects and human life experiences in shaping patterns of linguistic behavior across the adult life-span. These insights provide an ideal springboard for a consolidated theoretical framework of the principles underlying language change, language variation and aging with a view toward developing a synthesized, pan-theoretically valid model of linguistic change that accounts for intra-speaker instability.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants