Slang Words and the Adolescent Peak - Undergraduate Scholars 2023

Sociolinguists have claimed that the use of slang terms increases during a speaker's teenage years, but subsequently decline with the onset of adulthood, a phenomenon called 'the adolescent peak.' This research, conducted by undergraduate students at the University of Manchester, traces two speakers over the course of their adolescence to test if an adolescent peak can be identified for a number of colloquial expressions. The investigation was carried out as part of the 2023 Undergraduate Scholars programme. Contents: [00:00] Introduction (Richard Zimmermann) [00:53] The Student-Transcribed Corpus of Spoken American English (Reet K Maur) [03:49] Construction of the corpus (Yan Lee) [05:49] The speakers (Georgina Willoughby) [08:52] Research question (Yanhao Li) [11:35] Methdology and results (Kriti Mehrota) [14:39] Results continued (Faatima Adam) [18:03] Discussion and conclusion (Grace Carrier)