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

Buson, Laurence; Billiez, Jacqueline

doi:10.1515/ling-2013-0013

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Once deployed, this schema in turn, in a top-down process, activates the variants that it includes, even if they are absent from the heard message. This model is coherent with several phenomena in the field of sociolinguistics: erasure (Irvine, 2001) according to which the addressee selects certain salient sociolinguistic features while disregarding others, the halo effect (Moreau & Brichard, 1997) that extends a social stereotype to an entire utterance, emphasizing certain cues and eclipsing others, and so-called sociolinguistic restoration (Buson & Billiez, 2013), which is the focus of this paper. Its discovery was the result of an incidental observation: When children reported on utterances including formal vocabulary and standard variants, they stated they had heard formal variants that were absent from the input but consistent with the rest of the utterance (Buson, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 72%

“…Our main prediction was that non‐identical repetitions would be more frequent when repeating sociolinguistically non‐homogeneous utterances than when repeating homogeneous ones. According to Buson and Billiez's model (; see Section 1), utterances with a clear sociolinguistic orientation, but including a non‐coherent variant, mobilize a sociolinguistic schema that, in turn, activates the competing but compatible variant. Conversely, in a homogeneous utterance, the variants are all coherent with the sociolinguistic schema and the target variant can be produced identically.…”

Section: Experiments 1: Sociolinguistic Repetition Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Categorization of sociolinguistic varieties could be based on salient sociolinguistic cues that may be associated with more visible groups of speakers. Buson and Billiez (2013) proposed a model of sociolinguistic perception explaining how a non-coherent utterance is transformed into a homogeneous percept. In their view, speakers memorize schemata associating frequent sociolinguistic variants from the same or different linguistic levels with social information about the probable users of these cues or their probable contexts of use.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Sociolinguistic Repetition Task: A New Paradigm for Exploring the Cognitive Coherence of Language Varieties

Buson

Nardy

Michelet

et al. 2018

Topics in Cognitive Science

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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.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 72%

Section: Experiments 1: Sociolinguistic Repetition Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Sociolinguistic Repetition Task: A New Paradigm for Exploring the Cognitive Coherence of Language Varieties

Buson

Nardy

Michelet

et al. 2018

Topics in Cognitive Science

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“…For children, they refer to the truth-value or the politeness of the utterance they are evaluating. It would seem that it is only from the age of 9-10 years that the first justifications for linguistic norms based on context/interlocutor are verbalized (Buson 2009;Buson and Billiez this issue). This is also the age at which children's judgments of regional accents are negative and they favor standard variants.…”

Section: Evaluation Of Sociolinguistic Variables and Link With Producmentioning

confidence: 99%

The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation: Looking back and thinking ahead

Nardy¹,

Chevrot

Barbu

2013

Linguistics

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Although developmental sociolinguistics is a relatively under-researched field, several studies have described children's 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.

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“…Labov (, p. 437) views the early acquisition of stylistic variation as resulting from transmission of variation on the formal/informal dimension: ‘formal speech variants are associated by children with instruction and punishment [teaching and discipline], informal speech with intimacy and fun’. However, the ability to evaluate socially motivated style, interpret local dialect forms, and make stylistic choices in different communicative contexts develops later, between 9 and 12 years of age (Barbu, Martin, & Chevrot, ; Buson & Billiez, ; Kinzler & DeJesus, ). At this age, preadolescents seem to have the necessary socio‐cognitive maturity allowing them to start projecting their own position within their speech community.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The old, the new, and the in‐between: Preadolescents’ use of stylistic variation in speech in projecting their own identity in a culturally changing environment

Jacewicz

Fox

2018

Developmental Science

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Cultural learning begins early, with infants' and young children's initial imitations of group-specific local behaviors. Comparatively little is known about cultural development in older children, whose more advanced socio-cognitive skills can moderate their decisions about adherence to the established cultural conventions and acceptance of new norms. Focusing on the acquisition of a regional dialect, the current study was conducted in a small community in western North Carolina, whose rich Appalachian heritage grew from distinctive cultural and living traditions. The region has gradually opened up to outside influences and the local culture is now shifting toward mainstream American socio-cultural norms. The study sought to determine how preadolescents positioned themselves in this socio-culturally changing environment. Using detailed acoustic analysis to measure stylistic variation in speech in 9-12-year-olds and perceptual ratings to verify its salience, we examined the pronunciation of the vowel /ai/ to test children's adherence to the old Appalachian identity marker (the monophthong) and their acceptance of the modern American society (the diphthong). As an innovation, children created an intermediate phonetic variant that reduced the pronunciation differences between the old and modern patterns. Demonstrating the ability to adapt speech style to context, they increased the degree of diphthongization in this /ai/-variant in careful speech (reading), and reduced it in casual conversations. Girls' productions were more diphthongal than were boys' in reading but not in conversations. The new variant in children represents regional dialect levelling, and likely results from their accommodation to the changing environment, which promotes reduction of old marked forms.

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

Cited by 12 publications

References 24 publications

The Sociolinguistic Repetition Task: A New Paradigm for Exploring the Cognitive Coherence of Language Varieties

The Sociolinguistic Repetition Task: A New Paradigm for Exploring the Cognitive Coherence of Language Varieties

The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation: Looking back and thinking ahead

The old, the new, and the in‐between: Preadolescents’ use of stylistic variation in speech in projecting their own identity in a culturally changing environment

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