Learning to talk Philadelphian: Acquisition of short a by preschool children

Abstract

Recent work in the acquisition of variation has shown that children begin to learn patterns of stable variation at a very early age. In fact, it appears that they acquire variable rules at about the same time as they are acquiring related categorical rules. Little is known, however, about the transmission from generation to generation of features undergoing sound change in progress. Therefore, this study examines the acquisition of the Philadelphia short a pattern by 18 3- and 4-year-old children. Even though this pattern of the raising and tensing of short a is a complex one, the children had, for the most part, acquired it. In almost all cases, the children matched the short a distribution both of their parents and a group of adult Philadelphians who were interviewed in the mid 1970s and described in Labov (1989b). These results indicate that even the youngest members of the speech community are actively participating in ongoing sound change.

The relationship between the group and the individual and the acquisition of native speaker variation patterns: A preliminary study

“…It has become apparent from many variation studies of SLA that, in fact, L2 speakers "tend to observe the linguistic constraints that are found in L1 spoken French" (Rehner, Mougeon, and Nadasdi 2003: 134). It is also the case that L1 studies of variation show that even very young children seem to learn very early adult native patterns of variation (Roberts 1997;Roberts and Labov 1995). A calculation of rates of deletion over the three years was made, to gauge general patterns of use over the three different contexts of acquisition (formal and informal) at three different phases: Year 1, before the stay abroad, when the students were largely formal learners, Year 2, after the stay abroad in the native speech community and Year 3, after a further year back in the classroom.…”

Mixed Accents: Scottish Children with English Parents

“…The lack of literature on such cases is surprising: such families are relatively common in modern speech communities. The study of how social or gender variation within a single speech community is acquired is also surprisingly uncommon (but see for example Roberts and Labov 1995or Docherty et al 2002, 2006. The predominantly monodialectal literature in acquisition studies, moreover, tends to focus on standard varieties of English, in particular Southern Standard British English (SSBE) -also known traditionally as Received Pronunciation (RP) -and General American (GA).…”

“…Braber and Butterfint 2008;StuartSmith et al 2013). Given that children are active members of their speech communities ), that they acquire systems forged from the models around them, and that they participate in sound changes within these communities (Roberts and Labov 1995), looking at Scottish children o f English parents throughout Scotland -and not only along the Scottish-English border -enables a range of theoretical questions relating to acquisition and bidialectalism to be addressed.…”

“…Finally, the difference in voting patterns in the independence referendum of 2014 were, unspurprisingly, very different in the two cities, with some areas of Glasgow voting for a politically independent Scotland, and Edinburgh voting strongly against, in favour of the UK status quo. Roberts and Labov (1995) and Jacewicz et al (2011) have demonstrated that younger children are able to utilise the same speech patterns as adults in their dialect area, so it can be hypothesised that children being raised in Scotland by Scottish-accented parents are likely to be successfully acquiring the dialect of their local area. It is further conjectured that children being raised in Scotland with English-accented parents are likely to have an increased incidence of English dialect features in their speech.…”

“…The output of acquisition is not simply a parent-identical phonology, even in cases when the parents' accents are in fact phonologically identical. Instead, the child integrates a range of influences: mixed parental and caregiver input (Roberts and Labov 1995;Kerswill and Williams 2000;Matthews 2001;Gordeeva 2005); peer or sibling influence (Starks and Bayard 2002); dialect mixing across borders (AISEB 2012); a mismatch between parental accent and the community (Chambers 1992;Scobbie 2005Scobbie , 2006Tagliamonte and Molfenter 2007); and even the use of nonlocal accents on television , 2013. All of these factors are, moreover, inextricably linked with the attitudes of child and adult speakers to both their own and others' use of regional varieties because "speakers' phonetic variation can affect how others socially evaluate them" (MacFarlane and Stuart-Smith 2012, 764).…”