Chapter 7
Early phonological acquisition in multi-accent contexts
Many children acquire the sound system of their language(s) in multi-accent environments. Yet, the
variation and inconsistencies that exist in the linguistic input to these children and the effects of variable input
on early phonological development remain relatively underexplored and underrepresented in the field of language
acquisition. This chapter provides an overview of the growing body of work that examines early phonological
acquisition in diverse contexts. It first describes the monolingual and bilingual contexts in which the phonetic and
phonological properties of adult input can be particularly variable, followed by the different types of input
variability. The implications of variable input on phonological development in children are then discussed, before
some recommendations for researching early phonological acquisition.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Input variability and phonological acquisition
- 2.Sociolinguistic contexts in which input properties can be variable
- 2.1Multi-varietal monolingual contexts
- 2.2Bi-/multilingual contexts
- 2.2.1Late-L2 bilingual caregivers and L1 attriters
- 2.2.2Ethnic minorities/heritage speakers
- 2.2.3Multilingual societies and long-term language contact
- 3.Types of variability
- 3.1Differential features in late-L2 bilingual caregivers and L1 attriters
- 3.2Structured and socially-conditioned variation
- 3.2.1Intra-speaker variation
- 3.2.2Inter-speaker variation
- 4.Implications of variable input for early phonological development
- 4.1Regularisation
- 4.2Delayed category formation / unstable phonemic categories
- 4.3Input effects and differential production in children
- 4.4Acquisition of socially-conditioned variation
- 4.5Influence of peer and community norms
- 5.Conclusion and some recommendations for researching child language
-
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