The primary goal of the Ohio Regional Dialect Developmental Repository (ORDDR) project is to increase our understanding of the development of sociolinguistic competence. Given the sparsity of the previous research in this domain, the specific aims of this project are:
1) To conduct a series of focused cross-sectional studies using a range of dialect perception and production tasks to probe specific areas of dialect competence across the lifespan and to validate the methods for the large cross-sectional repository. These experiments will also be used to develop a standardized inventory for identifying a child’s progress with respect to sociolinguistic milestones.
2) To collect a large set of cross-sectional data documenting children’s and adults’ abilities across the key components of dialect processing. This within-participant data set will be used to establish descriptive milestones in the development of sociolinguistic competence and to investigate the learning mechanisms involved. This data set will comprise the Ohio Regional Dialect Developmental Repository (ORDDR), which will serve as a resource for the larger research community.
3) To use the ORDDR as a baseline for comparison for sociolinguistic development in atypical populations (such as Autism Spectrum Disorder and Williams Syndrome), which are known to have cognitive profiles that show an uneven distribution of skills in areas related to sociolinguistic competence.
This work was supported by a Seed Grant from the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Ohio State University.
