Volume 51, Issue 2 - Language Acquisition and Sociolinguistic Variation

Although developmental sociolinguistics is a relatively under-researched field, several studies have described children's use of sociolinguistic variables and some have suggested theoretical accounts for the learning mechanisms underpinning their acquisition. Taking a historical point of view, this paper aims firstly to provide an exhaustive review of the studies focused on phonological variables over the past four decades. In the second section, we then deal with three theoretical approaches to the acquisition of variation: abstract variable rule formation, case-by-case concrete learning and exemplar theory. We discuss the main assumptions of these accounts, such as the role of input frequency, abstraction and generalization processes and the construction of the relationship between linguistic and social information. Finally, in the light of this discussion and in line with the available results, we argue in favor of the usage-based theory of language acquisition (Tomasello 2003) as a general framework including exemplar theory and explaining how children learn variable and categorical linguistic forms as well as their social use.

Despite the assumption in early studies that children are monostylistic until sometime around adolescence, a number of studies since then have demonstrated that adult-like patterns of variation may be acquired much earlier. How much earlier, however, is still subject to some debate. In this paper we contribute to this research through an analysis of a number of lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic variables across 29 caregiver/child pairs aged 2;10 to 4;2 in interaction with their primary caregivers. We first establish the patterns of use – both linguistic and social – in caregiver speech and then investigate whether these patterns of use are evident in the child speech. Our findings show that the acquisition of variation is highly variable dependent: some show age differentiation, others do not; some show acquisition of style shifting, others do not; some show correlations between caregiver input and child output, others do not. We interpret these findings in the light of community norms, social recognition and sociolinguistic value in the acquisition of variation at these early stages.

The emergence of metapragmatic competence in children and the cognitive processes involved in the ability to evaluate style remain under-researched. They are, however, essential to understanding both stylistic usage in context and the developmental dynamic of the acquisition of variation. This article presents a study carried out with 196 children aged 9–11 in the Grenoble area (France), focusing upon representations of stylistic variation. It explores the central question of the association between salience and stereotypes in the construction of judgments on style. Analysis of the children’s discourse identifies a number of criteria to which they refer in explaining their impressions of style. A schema-based model is then put forward for the cognitive process at work in stylistic evaluation, combining top-down and bottom-up processes.

This paper reports the results of an experimental study designed to investigate how listeners learn to create new associations between phonetic properties of the speech signal and external social referents. Very little is known of how this learning takes place in children, and it is a particularly challenging area to study given the difficulty in controlling some of the variables which are likely to be important factors in children's learning of the productive and interpretative dimensions of social-indexical phonetic variation. Thus, in this study, we focus on adult listeners in order to develop a sense of how adults might approach this learning task, and also to test out a method for probing this form of learning in a controlled fashion. 49 participants were trained on new patterns of social-indexical variability and, in a subsequent test phase, we assessed the extent to which this training led the listeners to acquire new associations between specific realizational variants and the social categories with which they have been associated in the training material. Results are reported from four experimental conditions which provided listeners with a range of different learning tasks. Our findings suggest that learning of novel sociophonetic associations can be achieved as the result of a relatively short amount of exposure to training material incorporating the new association, but that the success with which learning takes place is dependent on a number of factors such as the nature of the criterial variable and individual learner variation.

Whether social uses of language, in concert with their acquisition, are driven by the awareness of the social value assigned to linguistic variants remains unanswered. The present study examines how 185 French native speakers, aged from 2 to 6 years from different social backgrounds, produce and evaluate a well-known French phonological alternation, the liaison: obligatory liaisons, which are categorical and do not vary sociolinguistically for adults, and variable liaisons, which are a sociolinguistic variable and are more frequently produced by higher-class adults. Different developmental and social patterns were found for obligatory and variable liaisons. Children's productions of obligatory liaisons were related to their judgments when 3–4 years old, regardless of the children's social backgrounds. However, a developmental gap was observed between higher- and lower-class children that appeared earlier in production than in evaluation. For variable liaisons, children's productions were related to their judgments, irrespective of their social backgrounds, at 4–5 years. Social differences appeared in both children's productions and judgments a year later. Although the ability to evaluate different linguistic forms emerges at an early developmental stage, the awareness of the social value of the variants does not seem to precede the ability to select the standard varieties in formal situations.

This paper aims to document two adjustment types motivating code choices in early production in the multilingual context of Veneto (Italy), where the regional dialects and Italian share the same geolinguistic space. Languages with which a child comes into contact in his/her environment could provide a vantage point for the study of early contextual language adjustments. We compared the early production of a child – Francesco (17–30 months) – with his input, through a quantitative lexical approach to the material. Data were collected in an ecological family setting. Dyadic interactions (15 hours) were recorded in Francesco's home and multiparty interactions (20 hours) were recorded in his grandparents' home. In the first setting, statistically-driven acquisition could justify the adjustments in Francesco's production to the language choices in his home environment. In the second setting, where social interaction is different, pragmatically motivated adjustments are more likely to ground Francesco's choices. Results from the analyses suggest that a) child-directed speech promotes steady acquisition of the language which is selected the most frequently in the input and that b) pragmatically explicit interactional contexts could favor the production of lesser used languages.

This paper examines the role that multiple models of English play in the daily interactions of English-Arabic bilingual children growing up in the UK and how these models are harnessed for communicative purposes. Bilingual children are often regularly exposed to standard, nonstandard, and non-native varieties of either of their languages. These varieties constitute the source of phonological knowledge for these children and influence their sociolinguistic development (Khattab 2009). The bilinguals' sociolinguistic competence not only concerns their ability to switch between languages, but also to switch between native and non-native varieties for communicative purposes. To illustrate this behavior we report on convergence and divergence patterns by three English-Arabic bilingual children aged 5, 7, and 10, growing up in Yorkshire, England. The aim is to explore the role of social, contextual, and interactional factors in shaping the bilinguals' English accent and their developing sociophonetic competence. Semi-structured interactions between the children and their mothers are analyzed for language use and within that, for specific phonetic aspects of the children's English accent in English-only and in codeswitched utterances. Results show that the bilinguals' English codeswitches exhibit systematic patterns in their usage of variants from one language or the other, and from one English variety or the other, depending on the communicative situation. This suggests that bilinguals acquire both native (local and supra local) and non-native features of English and seem to harness phonetic detail from these varieties for divergence or convergence strategies. The results also suggest that bilinguals may constantly move between bilingual and monolingual modes during the course of the interaction depending on the needs of the situation.