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Part of
Advances in Sociophonetics
Edited by Chiara Celata and Silvia Calamai
[Studies in Language Variation 15] 2014
► pp. 17–28

The sociophonetic orientation of the language learner

This paper is an effort to define the phonetic target of the language learner: what are the data that the child focuses on in becoming a native speaker? A number of studies are reviewed to show that children reject the idiosyncratic features of their parents’ phonetic system if they do not match the pattern of the larger speech community:  in the acquisition of the Philadelphia and New York City dialects;  the formation of a new dialect in Milton Keynes; the spread of the low back merger in eastern New England; the reduction of the future marker in Tok Pisin. The end result is a high degree of uniformity in both the categorical and variable aspects of language, where individual variation is reduced below the level of linguistic significance.

Published online: 12 June 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.15.01lab
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