Jean-Pierre Chevrot

Developmental Data on a French Sociolinguistic Variable: Post-Consonantal Word-Final /R/.

To begin, we review three theoretical problem areas in the field of research into phonological variation in children. Next, we present the results of a cross-sectional study of two groups of children, aged 6 to 7 years and 10 to 12 years, relating to the deletion of post-consonantal word-final 0R0 in French (production and judgments of acceptability). In an experimental study, we then examine the mechanism involved in the learning of words with a variable0R0. Finally, the interpretation of the results within the framework of a cognitive conception of variation leads us to four conclusions: (i) children have a tendency to copy adult surface forms rather than to encode a variable rule; (ii) orthography causes the late encoding of certain variable 0R0s; (iii) the establishment of linguistic factors precedes that of social factors; and (iv) age-related changes are not guided by the sociolinguistic value that groups consciously attribute to the variables. Phonological variation has been the object of many studies in the field of sociolinguistic research. Despite undeniable advances based on the observation of adults and adolescents, developmental approaches to variation remain rare. This state of affairs is particularly marked in France, where variationist sociolinguistics is almost nonexistent (Gadet, 1996). Within this context, our contribution takes two directions. First, the observation of studies devoted to phonological variation in English-speaking children enables us to define three developmental issues that structure this field. 1 Second, the report of a survey and an experiment into the deletion of post-consonantal word-final 0R0 in French children aged 6 to 12 years supplies data that can help us shed light on some of these issues. THREE D EVELOPMENT A L I SSUES

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.

Introduction: Language acquisition and sociolinguistic variation

The special issue appears in a new scientific landscape of innovative attempts to link sociolinguistics and cognitive psycholinguistics. Studies on acquisition of variation have been conducted since the late 1960s, but the changing scientific landscape gives them a new impetus. On the one hand, our work draws on and contributes to sociolinguistics. As a result, it focuses on the acquisition of sociolinguistic patterns conceived of as properties shared by communities of speakers consisting of both children and adults. At the same time, our work draws on the traditions of developmental psycholinguistics. These connections lead us to discuss the cognitive mechanisms that are involved in the acquisition of sociolinguistic variants and social meaning. The contributions of the special issue address four questions which may be the key driving issues in research in the years to come.

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.

The late acquisition of a major difficulty of French inflectional orthography: The homophonic /E/ verbal endings

The aim of this article is to give an overview of researches about the acquisition of /E/ verb endings in French as a first language. The spelling of this suffixal inflection is a major difficulty of French orthography, because many alternative spellings are available. For example, the single phonological form /paRlE/ can be spelled , , , , , , , , , all of which are frequently used. This spelling difficulty is sustainable and generates strategies from writers who seem to accommodate opposite constraints originating in different linguistic levels of the French writing system. The main findings of a study carried out in school with 621 students from 8- to 14 year-old are presented: the early competition between and inflections, the over-regularization of the agreement with the subject and finally the interaction between the selection of the morphonogram and the over-regularization of the agreement with the subject. Ultimately, the data collected show a very long and costly acquisition of the spelling skill that confirms that French writing system is one of the most difficult to master.

Gender context effects in noun recognition: grammatical cues or co-occurrence effects?

ABSTRACT Determiners with congruent gender facilitate the recognition of the following noun. We examine two explanations of this effect: either gender information is retrieved and influences lexical access, or gender effects are due to the determiner-noun co-occurrence. French nouns are either feminine or masculine and are preceded by feminine or masculine determiners in the singular. Plural articles are unmarked for gender. Because some nouns (peanuts) occur more frequently in the plural than in their singular, they frequently co-occur with determiners that do not provide gender information. Conversely, nouns that occur more frequently in their singular form (cathedral) co-occur more frequently with gender-marked determiners. We examined the recognition of plural- and singular-oriented nouns preceded by gender-marked and unmarked determiners. Singular-oriented nouns were recognised faster after gender-marked (singular) articles than after gender-unmarked (plural) ones. However, plural-oriented nouns were recognised faster after gender-unmarked (plural) articles, suggesting that articles/nouns co-occurrence outweigh abstract gender cue.

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.