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Article published In:
Child Language Variation: Sociolinguistic and formal approaches
Edited by Véronique Lacoste and Lisa Green
[Linguistic Variation 16:1] 2016
► pp. 12–33

Acquisition of a rural variety

Glottalization in Vermont

Glottal stop is a widely reported phenomenon in the United Kingdom, but it has been rarely studied in the United States. The current study follows up on work on this feature in a wide age range of speakers in Vermont. Currently the speakers comprise thirty-six children ages 2;6 to 5 from this same location. In addition to demonstrating that these children have acquired the phonological constraints, as well as the full range of allophones of /t/, the results provide a lens through which to explore other issues of language acquisition and language variation, most notably, the boundary between dialectal and developmental variation. In general, it is argued that sociolinguistically conditioned variation adds empirical as well as theoretical value to studies of phonetically and phonologically conditioned variation and acquisition of the phonological system by first language learners.

Keywords: variation, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, glottalization, American English
Published online: 13 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.16.1.02rob
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