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Part of
Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change: Historical sociolinguistic perspectives
Edited by Israel Sanz-Sánchez
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 14] 2024
► pp. 203–233

Chapter 9
Child and adolescent transmission and incrementation in acquisition in historical sociophonetic data from English in Missouri, 1880–2000

ORCID logo | University of Warwick
Phonological conditioning of allophones of /æ/ is typologically important for American Englishes and a site of ongoing sound change. Combining historical and present-day data, this chapter traces productions of /æ/ in the US state of Missouri from the 1880s to 1990s. It reveals a transition to a nasal /æ/ system that progressed via children’s probabilistic calculations, as children initially acquired the /æ/ of their speech community (transmission) and then introduced innovations as they approached adulthood (incrementation). It also posits roots for the actuation of modern-day /æ/-backing in turn-of-the-century associations with high socioeconomic status and/or metropolitan Kansas City, which may have initiated incrementation. These findings highlight the value of historical sociophonetic explorations of sound changes as consequences of cognitive processes of language acquisition.
Keywords: sound change, nasal system, /æ/, trap, pre-nasal, priors, probabilistic, transmission, incrementation, historical sociophonetics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2./æ/ in American Englishes
  • 3.Probabilistic processing of sociophonetic inputs in transmission and incrementation
  • 4.The dataset
  • 5.Transmission and incrementation in multi-generational speech community sound changes
  • 6.Language acquisition and the historical sociolinguistics of /æ/ in Missouri English
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 4 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.14.09str
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