Mixed Accents: Scottish Children with English Parents

Abstract

We discuss accent mixture and the creation of idiosyncratic phonological systems in acquisition, with a focus on Scottish English. Such mixing is in addition to the relatively stable sociolinguistic systems of variation expected within a speech community, and arises when parents have radically different accents from each other or from the child's peers or other adult models. In terms of traditional geographic dialectology, there are a number of isoglosses around the Scotland/England border, but modern social mobility means that in some Scottish cities there are large numbers of families with at least one non-Scottish adult accent acting as a model for acquisition, which may feed into phonological change. Of particular interest is the influence of Southern British English accents.We exemplify the issues with two short case studies. The first concerns a child with mixed Scottish/English input in the home. His speech patterns do indeed indicate the acquisition of a mixed system. The second focuses on inter-sibling variation, looking at two sibling pairs who exemplify a different mix of accent features from each other. We examine two main diagnostics: monophthongal vs. diphthongal productions of the vowels in FACE and GOAT; and rhoticity. We also describe a parental demographic and accent attitude questionnaire as part of Case Study 2. The results support the need for speaker-by-speaker study of how incompatibility between two target systems is handled. We conclude that descriptions of mixed accents should be more common in the literature and approached on a feature-by-feature basis to help develop models of accent interference.

Variation in quality of maternal input and development of coda stops in English-speaking children in Singapore

“…Parents are the primary sources of input in the formative years, and thus in this study we see strong correspondences between properties of the input and properties of the children's output. In mixed-dialects environments, children may adopt accent features of both fathers and mothers (e.g., Thomas & Scobbie, 2015). However, this input-production relation is often overridden by peer effects or community norms as children get older.…”

“…Studies that examined this input-production relationship have shown that speech properties of child production reflect specific properties of the caregiver input, especially in the early developmental years. Thomas and Scobbie (2015), for example, examined the FACE and GOAT vowels of a Glasgow boy aged 3;1 raised by parents with different British English accents; his father spoke Scottish Standard English (SSE), while his mother's accent closely resembled Southern Standard British English (SSBE). For the FACE lexical set, the boy used the SSBE [eɪ] predominantly, reflecting the accent of his mother.…”

“…What is often overlooked, however, is that variability in phonological development or outcomes can also be a result of differences in the quality of inputthat is, the specific phonetic and phonological properties in the language models. Monolingual children may be raised in mixed-accent or bi-dialectal families (e.g., Stanford, 2008;Thomas & Scobbie, 2015), or by bilectal caregivers who may modify their child-directed speech according to the age and gender of child, and situational context (e.g., Foulkes & Docherty, 2006;Smith, Durham & Fortune, 2007). Language input in bilingual communities can be even less homogenous, given the possible variation in the language background of caregivers (Lleó, 2016).…”

Evaluating English Teachers’ Pronunciation Skills (E-TPS) Using Praat Technology and Human Raters

“…Furthermore, pronunciation assessment tends to focus on standard varieties of English. This is because varieties tend to lack the sort of accepted codification typically required by applied linguists as a foundation, whether in building resources in language learning, language teaching, or speech technology, or in a particular area of interest, such as clinical and development assessments of typical phonological acquisition (Thomas & Scobbie, 2015). In the context of speech technology, Praat is the proper device to be applied (Boersma et al, 2007).…”