Developmental sociolinguistics: Children's acquisition of language variation

Abstract

Developmental sociolinguistics is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary framework that builds upon theoretical and methodological contributions from multiple disciplines (i.e., sociolinguistics, language acquisition, the speech sciences, developmental psychology, and psycholinguistics). A core assumption of this framework is that language is by its very nature variable, and that much of this variability is informative, as it is (probabilistically) governed by a variety of factors—including linguistic context, social or cultural context, the relationship between speaker and addressee, a language user's geographic origin, and a language user's gender identity. It is becoming increasingly clear that consideration of these factors is absolutely essential to developing realistic and ecologically valid models of language development. Given the central importance of language in our social world, a more complete understanding of early social development will also require a deeper understanding of when and how language variation influences children's social inferences and behavior. As the cross‐pollination between formerly disparate fields continues, we anticipate a paradigm shift in the way many language researchers conceptualize the challenge of early acquisition. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Linguistics > Language Acquisition Neuroscience > Development Psychology > Language

Children’s Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation

“…Evidence for this general tendency comes from studies of lexical and phonological variation, as well as morphosyntactic variation. For instance, in their study of 29 children in Buckie, Scotland, ages 2;10 to 4;2, Smith and Durham (2019) found that the 2;10-3;1-year-olds primarily produced standard lexical and lexicalphonological forms like pretty and what, whereas the 3;2-4;2-year-olds varied between standard and local forms like pretty ~ bonnie and what ~ fit (See also Johnson & White, 2020). Miller (2013a) also found that children first relied on one variant in her study of 2-5-year-old Chilean children's syllable final /s/ lenition.…”

Navigating Accent Variation: A Developmental Perspective

“…In the past 50 years, we have learned a great deal about the remarkable efficiency with which the typical infant masters their native language or languages (see Johnson and White, 2020;Swingley, 2009;Werker and Curtin, 2005 for an overview). Crucially for the purposes of this review, however, most of this work has involved presenting infants with stimuli spoken in the regionally dominant variety of the child's native language.…”

Children’s Linguistic Repertoires Across Dialect and Standard Speech: Mirroring Input or Co-constructing Sociolinguistic Identities?

“…Artificial language learning experiments have demonstrated that children tend to regularize input that varies unsystematically (Hudson Kam & Newport, 2005) but that they are able to learn the probabilistic regularities of socially conditioned language variation (Samara et al, 2017). Thus, acquiring patterns of variation is an integral and manageable part of language acquisition, which starts early and occurs (at least in part) simultaneously with other aspects of language acquisition (Johnson & White, 2020). At the same time, while linguistic and socio-indexical knowledge are likely to be acquired in parallel, the development of sociolinguistic competence is a prolonged process that takes years (Dossey et al, 2020).…”