Laurence Buson

Representations of stylistic variation in 9- to 11-year-olds: Cognitive processes and salience

Abstract 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.

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.