Aurélie Nardy

The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation: Looking back and thinking ahead

Abstract Although developmental sociolinguistics is a relatively under-researched field, several studies have described childrens 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.

Language evaluation and use during early childhood: Adhesion to social norms or integration of environmental regularities?

Abstract 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. Childrens productions of obligatory liaisons were related to their judgments when 3–4 years old, regardless of the childrens 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, childrens productions were related to their judgments, irrespective of their social backgrounds, at 4–5 years. Social differences appeared in both childrens 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.

Sociolinguistic convergence and social interactions within a group of preschoolers: A longitudinal study

Sociolinguistic studies have shown that linguistic usage is closely related to social relationships and interactions between individuals. This has been established in adults and adolescents but developmental studies involving children are lacking. This paper studies whether and how peers influence the acquisition of social dialects in young children by using direct observations and quantitative analyses of spontaneous peer interactions and relationships at kindergarten. The longitudinal follow-up of one group of French-speaking children 4 to 5 years of age shows that the individual scores of sociolinguistic variables converge after one year of frequent contact. Moreover, we find that children who interact more frequently adopt similar usage of sociolinguistic variables, whereas other factors have no influence (teacher’s speech, child’s awareness of standard sociolinguistics norms, reported interpersonal attraction). These results provide the first evidence that social interactions within the peer group do have an influence on children’s linguistic usage through daily interactions at an early age.

Sex Differences in Language Across Early Childhood: Family Socioeconomic Status does not Impact Boys and Girls Equally

Child sex and family socioeconomic status (SES) have been repeatedly identified as a source of inter-individual variation in language development; yet their interactions have rarely been explored. While sex differences are the focus of a renewed interest concerning emerging language skills, data remain scarce and are not consistent across preschool years. The questions of whether family SES impacts boys and girls equally, as well as of the consistency of these differences throughout early childhood, remain open. We evaluated consistency of sex differences across SES and age by focusing on how children (N = 262), from 2;6 to 6;4 years old, from two contrasting social backgrounds, acquire a frequent phonological alternation in French – the liaison. By using a picture naming task eliciting the production of obligatory liaisons, we found evidence of sex differences over the preschool years in low-SES children, but not between high-SES boys and girls whose performances were very similar. Low-SES boys’ performances were the poorest whereas low-SES girls’ performances were intermediate, that is, lower than those of high-SES children of both sexes but higher than those of low-SES boys. Although all children’s mastery of obligatory liaisons progressed with age, our findings showed a significant impeding effect of low-SES, especially for boys.

The sociolinguistic repetition task: A new paradigm for exploring the cognitive coherence of language varieties.

Sociolinguistic studies generally focus on specific sociolinguistic variables. Consequently, they rarely examine whether different sociolinguistic variables have coherent orientation in a specific language variety (a social or a regional dialect) or whether the speakers freely mix sociolinguistic variants. While different attempts have been made to identify coherence and mixing in the production or perception of dialects, our aim is to answer this question at the level of the cognitive representation of varieties. For this purpose, we draw on the phenomenon of sociolinguistic restoration: when they repeat sociolinguistically mixed utterances, people tend to make them homogeneous. The first experiment-a repetition task-reproduced sociolinguistic restoration in an experimental setting. The second experiment-a judgment task-ensured that participants perceived the difference between homogeneous and mixed utterances. We conclude that high-order coherent representations influence the reconstruction of utterances during the repetition task.

Variation sociophonétique et acquisition du langage: repères, débats, perspectives

Cet article consiste en un recensement et une analyse de la trentaine d’etudes menees depuis cinq decennies sur l’acquisition de la variation sociophonetique dans differentes langues (essentiellement l’anglais, le francais et l’espagnol). Cette revue de la litterature est structuree autour des principaux facteurs de variation sociolinguistique (milieu social, genre, contexte, evaluation des variantes et lien avec la production) pour lesquels nous degageons des reperes developpementaux permettant de situer leur âge et leur ordre d’apparition. Les tendances mises au jour sont ensuite examinees au regard de deux questions theoriques centrees sur la dynamique developpementale. La premiere traite de l’influence de l’environnement langagier sur l’acquisition des variables sociolinguistiques et la seconde questionne le moteur du developpement de la competence sociolinguistique : resulte-t-il de l’apprentissage de normes ou d’un apprentissage implicite de regularites statistiques ? Pour finir, nous proposons des pistes de recherche pour les travaux ulterieurs menes dans une perspective de sociolinguistique developpementale.