Despite repeated calls for in-depth research, the acquisition of patterns of sociolinguistic variation has long been an underinvestigated topic both in sociolinguistics and in language acquisition research. With the exception of a few exploratory studies, most notably Labov (1964), it has long been rare for sociolinguistic research to focus on non-adults, whereas most research on language acquisition tended to take place in a sociolinguistic vacuum (see, e.g. Mills 1985: 142 and Labov 1989: 96 for statements to this effect). Over the last few years, however, the situation seems to be changing. Two reasons may be given for this: first, and quite trivially perhaps, technical advancements are making it possible to gather, store and explore data in cheap and efficient ways, providing researchers with the necessary data to conduct empirically sound research on the topic. And second, parallel to a paradigm shift from rule-based to usage-based conceptions of grammar, linguistic variation has moved into the centre of the attention of theoretical linguistics. As a result, the acquisition of variation can now be considered an ‘emergent topic’ in research on language variation in general.
The aim of this book is to offer a state-of-the-art of current research on the topic, thereby focusing on two particular objectives: (1) the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation presents itself as an interesting research topic for sociolinguists and psycholinguists working on acquisition, but also for a broad range of other sub-disciplines of linguistics, including historical linguistics, dialectology, and for researchers working in different theoretical frameworks. This book aims at bridging the gap between these disciplines and frameworks and allowing an interdisciplinary perspective on the topic; and (2) in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison, the book wants to bring together research carried out in different sociolinguistic constellations, as most obviously found in different language areas or different countries.
This study compares bi-dialectal and mono-dialectal five-and six-year-old children’s sociolinguistic awareness and ability to discriminate regional accents in their native language. Children who regularly hear multiple regional varieties in their input are expected to have better awareness and discrimination accuracy. The children participated in two tasks: an awareness task, assessing their knowledge of regional variation, and a similarity judgment task, assessing their ability to discriminate between speakers based on accents. Results show that both groups reliably discriminate between regional accents, and can identify a local regional accent. However, no advantage is found for either group of participants on either task. The effects of exposure to regional phonological variation on perception and awareness are discussed in light of these findings.
Studying children’s ability to construct themselves as pluristyle speakers goes hand-in-hand with studying their socialisation. Children’s conversational experiences are one of the key factors that allow them to integrate and participate in social life. This article will therefore present studies conducted in a school setting with the aim of better understanding the links between children’s stylistic usage and the social diversity of their social networks. The network approach has been widely used in adults but rarely with children and it allows the acquisition of variation to be considered in context, taking into account children’s horizontal socialisation beyond parental influences.
The present analysis will begin by looking briefly at existing work drawing on the notion of social networks in adults and teenagers in order to outline a number of related key research questions in terms of first-language acquisition. Some results obtained from a study conducted in Grenoble (France) with 10-11-year-old children will then be described (Buson 2009a, b). Finally, micro-sociolinguistic analysis will be used to return to some of the methodological issues that remain to be resolved in order to reach a more detailed understanding of the links between the acquisition of variation and the influence of peer networks.
The main questions of this paper are whether children acquire adults’ variable V1-V2/V2-V1 word order in the perfective two-verb cluster simultaneously with a rigid V1-V2 word order in the modal two-verb cluster from start of the acquisition process. The experimental results show that children acquire variable word orders following rigid ones confirming Labov’s (1989) expectation that children have to acquire grammatical properties before acquiring stylistic and sociolinguistic constraints. It is, however, not possible to disentangle whether the struggle with the variable word orders in the perfective cluster is due to grammatical reasons only or in combination with the fact that this type of variation reveals no significant social stratification among the adults.
Even though adolescence is well-known to be a key period for the acquisition of vernacular varieties, there seems to be little research on how attitudes change during adolescence. In addition, most sociolinguistic studies on adolescent language hardly discuss developmental factors. This study tries to mend these gaps in our knowledge, by investigating how attitudes towards a number of varieties of Dutch change in Flemish children between 8 and 18 years of age. Adolescence is shown to be a period in which attitudes further emerge and change considerably. The youngest children in our sample do seem to recognize Standard Dutch as a model for their own speech, and are thus competent to distinguish between different varieties of Dutch, but they hardly attribute any non-linguistic significance to language variation. As children grow older, they realize that there is a correlation between language variation and societal prestige. In addition, they become more sensitive to the ‘covert prestige’ of, especially, the local variety, which is increasingly evaluated as indexing integrity and as a means towards social and/or in-group success. Significant parallels are revealed between sociolinguistic and psychosocial development, including 11–12-year-olds’ tendency to think in terms of ‘perceived popularity’ (Cillessen and Rose 2005), and the peak around the age of 16 in conventional and social-clique dominated reasoning about friendship (Turiel 1983; Horn 2003).
The coexistence of dialect and standard varieties is a challenge for adult learners of German as a second language in the Swiss context. This paper presents data from three individuals showing how they handle the two varieties in their second language system. The insights gathered on their use of dialect and/or standard in free speech and in elicited language tasks illustrate that these second language users differ substantially in the respective extent of incorporation of dialect and standard into their second language system (showing more use of standard, of dialect, or a high amount of mixing). The three individuals thereby serve as examples of the possible range of how second language learners deal with variation depending on their social experiences, their social expectations about the surrounding linguistic community, and their intended position within it. The results also reveal that even though acquisition of variation is generally intricate, some variant forms, such as relative clause markers, are more complex and used with less ease than others.
The social structure provided by schools may play a significant role in shaping the speech of youth by fostering contact between distinct varieties (Britain 1997; Trudgill 1998). This analysis uses data from a longitudinal study of language and literacy development to explore the role of school demographics in determining trajectories of dialect patterns among African American school children in central North Carolina. Results identify distinct relationships between phonetic and morphosyntactic subsystems and school demographics. These results have implications for educational and policy issues related to the U.S. academic achievement gap and point to the need for further research on factors that influence the language of young speakers.
A child’s family network helps scaffold his/her language acquisition, transmitting style and variation through language choice and usage. By way of this knowledge, the child becomes a competent speaker in his/her community. We conducted a case study in Veneto (Italy), where children grow up in contact with both the regional language, Veneto, and Italian, the official national language. Adopting a (psycho)sociolinguistic approach to our corpora, we observed the language production of a young boy, Francesco (25 months) as he participated in multiparty interactions with his nuclear (his parents) and extended family members (his grandparents and one aunt). All utterances were transcribed and assigned to a category: Veneto, Italian, or mixed. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed the child’s utterances and those produced by his interlocutors. The overall results show that (1) adults prefer using Italian in their child-addressed speech, (2) Francesco uses mainly Italian, and (3) lexical choices made during multiparty interactions showed that Francesco’s Veneto production was greater when he was interacting with speakers who use more Veneto. The qualitative analyses focus on the adults’ different recasts of vocalic elements produced by Francesco in the determiner slot. We discuss how variation might guide the process of language socialization.
The linguistic reality of Cyprus is diglossic between the local variety of Cypriot Greek and the official language Standard Modern Greek. One of the better studied differences between the two varieties is clitic placement in syntactic environments where one requires enclisis and the other proclisis. This paper discusses the findings of two studies on the acquisition of object clitics so as to (i) explore the connection between bidialectalism and metalinguistic awareness and (ii) argue that competing motivations are relevant for the linguistic development in diglossic environments. Framed as the Socio-Syntax of Development Hypothesis, the process of constructing a socio-syntactic repertoire captures competing motivations by assuming that the linguistic development of Greek Cypriot children primarily involves the need to resolve linguistic accommodation and adjust to the “high” variety.
This study investigates the learning mechanisms underlying the acquisition of a dialect as a second language. We focus on the acquisition of phonological features of a Flemish dialect by children with Standard Dutch or a regional variety of Dutch as their first language. Data were gathered by means of picture naming and sentence completion tasks. Inspired by Chambers (1992), who found that the data of second dialect learners displayed S-curve patterns which he interpreted as evidence of rule-based learning, we examine whether similar S-curves can be observed in the learner data of our subjects. Contrary to Chambers, our subjects’ data do not display S-curves but bear evidence of word-by-word learning across the board. These data are consistent with analogical memory-based models of language acquisition. In order to further investigate the applicability of memory-based reasoning to our data, we perform a computational classification task in TiMBL (Daelemans & Van den Bosch 2005), in which the dialect forms of Standard Dutch words have to be predicted on the basis of various amounts of training data. Not only do we compare the accuracy scores of the model with the acquisition scores of our subjects, the classification task also gives us insight into which words constitute the nearest neighbours of a given word. On the basis of this output, we investigate the effect of the number of enemy neighbours on the degree to which the subjects realize the correct dialect variants of words and on the degree to which they make overgeneralization errors. The major finding of this paper is that dialect forms are more often realized incorrectly and that more overgeneralization errors occur in words with a large(r) number of enemy neighbours.
This study examines the acquisition of T-glottalling among teenage migrants in London. Results show that constraint hierarchies based on native input begin to be approached after two years in England. Initially, variation is completely reallocated; however, as teenagers spend more time in England, constraints are becoming increasingly similar to those of native speakers. While some constraints are replicated completely, there is also evidence that, even after three years in the country, some are altered, some are rejected, and some are re-interpreted, resulting in new constraints. Three tentative generalisations are made, relating to the order of constraint acquisition, constraint complexity and the role of grammatical category and word frequency as interpretative frameworks. In addition, the progression of constraint acquisition interacts with the increasing use of (t) as a stylistic resource, which allows teenagers to express identities based on the variation in (t) and other linguistic features. While style (as in attention paid to speech) does not appear until after three years in England in this study, qualitative analysis of interview data reveals that (t) is already available for stylistic work and experimentation after two years in England.
Despite repeated calls for in-depth research, the acquisition of patterns of sociolinguistic variation has long been an underinvestigated topic both in sociolinguistics and in language acquisition research. With the exception of a few exploratory studies, most notably Labov (1964), it has long been rare for sociolinguistic research to focus on non-adults, whereas most research on language acquisition tended to take place in a sociolinguistic vacuum (see, e.g. Mills 1985: 142 and Labov 1989: 96 for statements to this effect). Over the last few years, however, the situation seems to be changing. Two reasons may be given for this: first, and quite trivially perhaps, technical advancements are making it possible to gather, store and explore data in cheap and efficient ways, providing researchers with the necessary data to conduct empirically sound research on the topic. And second, parallel to a paradigm shift from rule-based to usage-based conceptions of grammar, linguistic variation has moved into the centre of the attention of theoretical linguistics. As a result, the acquisition of variation can now be considered an ‘emergent topic’ in research on language variation in general.
The aim of this book is to offer a state-of-the-art of current research on the topic, thereby focusing on two particular objectives: (1) the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation presents itself as an interesting research topic for sociolinguists and psycholinguists working on acquisition, but also for a broad range of other sub-disciplines of linguistics, including historical linguistics, dialectology, and for researchers working in different theoretical frameworks. This book aims at bridging the gap between these disciplines and frameworks and allowing an interdisciplinary perspective on the topic; and (2) in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison, the book wants to bring together research carried out in different sociolinguistic constellations, as most obviously found in different language areas or different countries.
This study compares bi-dialectal and mono-dialectal five-and six-year-old children’s sociolinguistic awareness and ability to discriminate regional accents in their native language. Children who regularly hear multiple regional varieties in their input are expected to have better awareness and discrimination accuracy. The children participated in two tasks: an awareness task, assessing their knowledge of regional variation, and a similarity judgment task, assessing their ability to discriminate between speakers based on accents. Results show that both groups reliably discriminate between regional accents, and can identify a local regional accent. However, no advantage is found for either group of participants on either task. The effects of exposure to regional phonological variation on perception and awareness are discussed in light of these findings.
Studying children’s ability to construct themselves as pluristyle speakers goes hand-in-hand with studying their socialisation. Children’s conversational experiences are one of the key factors that allow them to integrate and participate in social life. This article will therefore present studies conducted in a school setting with the aim of better understanding the links between children’s stylistic usage and the social diversity of their social networks. The network approach has been widely used in adults but rarely with children and it allows the acquisition of variation to be considered in context, taking into account children’s horizontal socialisation beyond parental influences.
The present analysis will begin by looking briefly at existing work drawing on the notion of social networks in adults and teenagers in order to outline a number of related key research questions in terms of first-language acquisition. Some results obtained from a study conducted in Grenoble (France) with 10-11-year-old children will then be described (Buson 2009a, b). Finally, micro-sociolinguistic analysis will be used to return to some of the methodological issues that remain to be resolved in order to reach a more detailed understanding of the links between the acquisition of variation and the influence of peer networks.
The main questions of this paper are whether children acquire adults’ variable V1-V2/V2-V1 word order in the perfective two-verb cluster simultaneously with a rigid V1-V2 word order in the modal two-verb cluster from start of the acquisition process. The experimental results show that children acquire variable word orders following rigid ones confirming Labov’s (1989) expectation that children have to acquire grammatical properties before acquiring stylistic and sociolinguistic constraints. It is, however, not possible to disentangle whether the struggle with the variable word orders in the perfective cluster is due to grammatical reasons only or in combination with the fact that this type of variation reveals no significant social stratification among the adults.
Even though adolescence is well-known to be a key period for the acquisition of vernacular varieties, there seems to be little research on how attitudes change during adolescence. In addition, most sociolinguistic studies on adolescent language hardly discuss developmental factors. This study tries to mend these gaps in our knowledge, by investigating how attitudes towards a number of varieties of Dutch change in Flemish children between 8 and 18 years of age. Adolescence is shown to be a period in which attitudes further emerge and change considerably. The youngest children in our sample do seem to recognize Standard Dutch as a model for their own speech, and are thus competent to distinguish between different varieties of Dutch, but they hardly attribute any non-linguistic significance to language variation. As children grow older, they realize that there is a correlation between language variation and societal prestige. In addition, they become more sensitive to the ‘covert prestige’ of, especially, the local variety, which is increasingly evaluated as indexing integrity and as a means towards social and/or in-group success. Significant parallels are revealed between sociolinguistic and psychosocial development, including 11–12-year-olds’ tendency to think in terms of ‘perceived popularity’ (Cillessen and Rose 2005), and the peak around the age of 16 in conventional and social-clique dominated reasoning about friendship (Turiel 1983; Horn 2003).
The coexistence of dialect and standard varieties is a challenge for adult learners of German as a second language in the Swiss context. This paper presents data from three individuals showing how they handle the two varieties in their second language system. The insights gathered on their use of dialect and/or standard in free speech and in elicited language tasks illustrate that these second language users differ substantially in the respective extent of incorporation of dialect and standard into their second language system (showing more use of standard, of dialect, or a high amount of mixing). The three individuals thereby serve as examples of the possible range of how second language learners deal with variation depending on their social experiences, their social expectations about the surrounding linguistic community, and their intended position within it. The results also reveal that even though acquisition of variation is generally intricate, some variant forms, such as relative clause markers, are more complex and used with less ease than others.
The social structure provided by schools may play a significant role in shaping the speech of youth by fostering contact between distinct varieties (Britain 1997; Trudgill 1998). This analysis uses data from a longitudinal study of language and literacy development to explore the role of school demographics in determining trajectories of dialect patterns among African American school children in central North Carolina. Results identify distinct relationships between phonetic and morphosyntactic subsystems and school demographics. These results have implications for educational and policy issues related to the U.S. academic achievement gap and point to the need for further research on factors that influence the language of young speakers.
A child’s family network helps scaffold his/her language acquisition, transmitting style and variation through language choice and usage. By way of this knowledge, the child becomes a competent speaker in his/her community. We conducted a case study in Veneto (Italy), where children grow up in contact with both the regional language, Veneto, and Italian, the official national language. Adopting a (psycho)sociolinguistic approach to our corpora, we observed the language production of a young boy, Francesco (25 months) as he participated in multiparty interactions with his nuclear (his parents) and extended family members (his grandparents and one aunt). All utterances were transcribed and assigned to a category: Veneto, Italian, or mixed. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed the child’s utterances and those produced by his interlocutors. The overall results show that (1) adults prefer using Italian in their child-addressed speech, (2) Francesco uses mainly Italian, and (3) lexical choices made during multiparty interactions showed that Francesco’s Veneto production was greater when he was interacting with speakers who use more Veneto. The qualitative analyses focus on the adults’ different recasts of vocalic elements produced by Francesco in the determiner slot. We discuss how variation might guide the process of language socialization.
The linguistic reality of Cyprus is diglossic between the local variety of Cypriot Greek and the official language Standard Modern Greek. One of the better studied differences between the two varieties is clitic placement in syntactic environments where one requires enclisis and the other proclisis. This paper discusses the findings of two studies on the acquisition of object clitics so as to (i) explore the connection between bidialectalism and metalinguistic awareness and (ii) argue that competing motivations are relevant for the linguistic development in diglossic environments. Framed as the Socio-Syntax of Development Hypothesis, the process of constructing a socio-syntactic repertoire captures competing motivations by assuming that the linguistic development of Greek Cypriot children primarily involves the need to resolve linguistic accommodation and adjust to the “high” variety.
This study investigates the learning mechanisms underlying the acquisition of a dialect as a second language. We focus on the acquisition of phonological features of a Flemish dialect by children with Standard Dutch or a regional variety of Dutch as their first language. Data were gathered by means of picture naming and sentence completion tasks. Inspired by Chambers (1992), who found that the data of second dialect learners displayed S-curve patterns which he interpreted as evidence of rule-based learning, we examine whether similar S-curves can be observed in the learner data of our subjects. Contrary to Chambers, our subjects’ data do not display S-curves but bear evidence of word-by-word learning across the board. These data are consistent with analogical memory-based models of language acquisition. In order to further investigate the applicability of memory-based reasoning to our data, we perform a computational classification task in TiMBL (Daelemans & Van den Bosch 2005), in which the dialect forms of Standard Dutch words have to be predicted on the basis of various amounts of training data. Not only do we compare the accuracy scores of the model with the acquisition scores of our subjects, the classification task also gives us insight into which words constitute the nearest neighbours of a given word. On the basis of this output, we investigate the effect of the number of enemy neighbours on the degree to which the subjects realize the correct dialect variants of words and on the degree to which they make overgeneralization errors. The major finding of this paper is that dialect forms are more often realized incorrectly and that more overgeneralization errors occur in words with a large(r) number of enemy neighbours.
This study examines the acquisition of T-glottalling among teenage migrants in London. Results show that constraint hierarchies based on native input begin to be approached after two years in England. Initially, variation is completely reallocated; however, as teenagers spend more time in England, constraints are becoming increasingly similar to those of native speakers. While some constraints are replicated completely, there is also evidence that, even after three years in the country, some are altered, some are rejected, and some are re-interpreted, resulting in new constraints. Three tentative generalisations are made, relating to the order of constraint acquisition, constraint complexity and the role of grammatical category and word frequency as interpretative frameworks. In addition, the progression of constraint acquisition interacts with the increasing use of (t) as a stylistic resource, which allows teenagers to express identities based on the variation in (t) and other linguistic features. While style (as in attention paid to speech) does not appear until after three years in England in this study, qualitative analysis of interview data reveals that (t) is already available for stylistic work and experimentation after two years in England.