For seven years in a row (2016 through 2022), we carried out a project with two goals. One was to train undergraduate students in sociolinguistic interviewing; the other was to catch change among English intensifiers. We expected to find an innovative variant, maybe either so or super. However, the incoming form we identify is very. We propose that, after a long decline, very became unusual enough to gain novelty value and be available for recycling. This surprising finding emerges clearly from our fine-grained, real-time data across two registers (speech and instant messaging) despite dozens of different student interviewers and two years of pandemic conditions. The cohesive patterns attest to the fundamental orderliness of language, even in phenomena such as English intensifiers that are characterized by constant, rapid change.

This study investigates how children aged 4 to 12 years participate in /u/-fronting, a phonetically conditioned change in Ontario English in which the high back vowel /u/ is initially more fronted after coronal consonants than in other contexts. A picture naming task was used to elicit vowel tokens from children and their parents, and F1 and F2 measurements were extracted using FAVE. Children in all three age groups (4-6, 7-9, 10-12 years) were found to have significantly higher F2 values for /u/ (indicating more fronting) than adults in the non-coronal environment. This pattern does not appear to follow the predicted pattern of incrementation of sound change by older children. Instead, the findings may reflect overgeneralization of /u/-fronting, with young children extending the change to a new phonetic context during acquisition, or an earlier start to the incrementation of this variable in this population.