here - Université Grenoble Alpes

Transcription

Abstract Booklet
Variation In Language Acquisition
Lidilem, Université de Grenoble
3-5 décembre 2014
Organization Committee
Sarah Alkankouni, Julie Bardet, Laurence Buson, Jean-Pierre Chevrot, Mylène Harnois-Delpiano,
Rozenn Gautier, Aurélie Nardy, Isabelle Rousset, Gabriela Viana (Lidilem - Université Grenoble
Alpes) and Anna Ghimenton (CLESTHIA - Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Contents
Wednesday 3 December 2014 Oral session
4
Transmission complete From preschool to preadolescence in the acquisition of
styleshifting
5
The dynamics of standard-dialect relationships : a developmental perspective
6
Child-directed speech and the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms Colloquial Belgian Dutch in Flemish families
8
La liaison variable en français L1 et L2, une étude contrastive de son acquisition
10
The role of L1 interference in the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in L2 :
the case of [t,d] deletion among Polish migrants in Edinburgh
12
Regional Accent Variation in the L1 and L2 : How do early bilinguals and late
L2-learners deal with it ?
14
Acquiring attitudes towards varieties of Dutch. A quantitative perspective
15
What hinders the acquisition of schwa alternation ?
16
Influence du milieu social sur la production de liaisons dans l’input parental :
Étude exploratoire de corpus denses
17
Attitudes towards and awareness of language variation in pre-school children in
Austria
19
Wednesday 3 December 2014 Poster session
21
Documenting and Understanding Language Change in the Acquisition of Endangered Languages : Neuter Pronouns in Picard
22
Adult learners’ (non-)acquisition of speaker-specific variation
24
A dynamic approach on the acquisition of allophones : a Brazilian Portuguese
Case Study
26
Capacité de discrimination codique d’enfants réunionnais : analyse d’une épreuve
d’identification linguistique
27
Usages de vingt enfants et de leur entourage à l’île de La Réunion : input et
output dans une communauté créole
30
Self-organization and variability in the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese vowel
system
32
Thursday 4 December 2014 Oral session
34
The social turn in child multilingual acquisition studies : The role of input
35
The dynamics of standard–dialect variation in acquiring and using German as a
second language
37
1
39
Variable interrogative structures in French L2-L2 informal discourse
41
The Acquisition of Social and Grammatical Competence by Jakarta Indonesian
Children
44
Pre-schoolers’ categorisation of speakers by regional accent
45
The content validity of Standard-German tests for assessing language development in Swiss-German-speaking children
48
Gender and age as cues in adult social language learning
50
The roles of peer and teacher variation in language acquisition in two-way immersion primary school classrooms
51
How SES affects the development of vocabulary and grammar in 3-to-4-year-olds
acquiring German as L1 and L2
53
Visiting Transatlantic Relatives : A Variationist Perspective on the Acquisition
of Syntactic Complexity
55
Thursday 4 December 2014 Poster session
57
From Code-switching to Translating : a corpusbased approach of bilingual repetitions
58
Belong(ing) : The effects of migration and attitude on the acquisition of Northern
Irish English
60
Acquisition et variation diastratique dans l’expression des émotions chez l’enfant
italien et roumain
62
Incremental acquisition of morphosyntactic variation :Evidence from children’s
Spanish subject pronoun expression
63
Input parental et acquisition de schémas d’alternance phonologique
65
Impact d’une Langue Seconde sur l’usage de la Langue Première en contexte
d’immigration : changements cognitifs et sociolinguistiques
67
Friday 5 December 2014 Oral session
69
“Sellouts” and “Wannabes” : Ownership, authenticity and the difficulty of acquiring another dialect
70
“You should have stayed longer” : The role of immersion in the acquisition of
the modalized conditional expressing counterfactuality
71
The role of gestures in bilingual children’s language socialization
72
Agency, Identity and L2 variation
73
The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation during a study abroad : a longitudinal
analysis of learners’ personal networks
74
2
The perception of sociophonetic variation by L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish
76
The maintenance of regional dialects in the social network of children aged 10-11
years : A matter of gender ?
78
Acquisition de la phonologie de l’anglais new-yorkais par des immigrants hispanocaribéens
80
Participants Mailing list
81
3
Wednesday 3 December 2014
Oral Session
4
Transmission complete From preschool to preadolescence in the
acquisition of styleshifting
Jennifer Smith1
University of Glasgow
1
Labov (2001 :437) observes that ‘children begin their language development with the pattern transmitted to them by their female caretakers, and any further changes are built on or added to that pattern.’
A case in point is styleshifting, where ‘Linguistic variation is transmitted to children as stylistic differentiation on the formal/informal dimension. . . .Formal speech variants are associated by children
with instruction and punishment, informal speech with intimacy and fun’ (ibid). The further development in styleshifting norms arises when ‘children learn that variants favoured in informal speech are
associated with lower social status in the wider community’ (ibid) and ‘later acquisition of superposed
dialects’ (Labov 2013 :247).
Our previous research on preschool children (2-4 year olds) in interaction with their primary caregivers (Smith et al 2007, 2009, 2013) showed that the caregivers used systematic patterns of styleshifting from vernacular to standard with some variables (1) but not with others (2). These patterns of
(non)styleshifting were transmitted to the children who faithfully replicated the patterns in their own
speech.
1. (child) Are we gan to Isla’s ? (caregiver) Uhuh. (child) Are we ? (caregiver) Later on, aye. (child)
Say yes or no. (caregiver) Aye. . . yes. (child) No, say yes or no. (caregiver) Yes.
2. (child) Is there pens in there ? (caregiver) Aye, there is. (child) My paints are in there.
What happens to these patterns of (non)styleshifting once the children move from the vernacular
dominated norms of the home to the standard dominated norms of the school ?
To tackle this question, we returned to the original preschool children now in pre-adolescence (11-13
years old). In order to tap the boundaries of styleshifting between vernacular and standard, we recorded the speakers with a) a community insider who uses the local vernacular and b) a community
outsider who uses a very standard dialect and replicated the analyses of variables carried out eight
years earlier.
In analysing the results, I appeal to Labov’s (1993, 2008) sociolinguistic monitor in interpreting the
(lack of) development of styleshifting from preschool to preadolescence, and indeed in later life.
5
The dynamics of standard-dialect relationships : a developmental
perspective
1
Annick De Houwer1, Wolfgang Wölck2
University of Erfurt, 2University at Buffalo
The dialect in the city of Antwerp, Belgium, has always carried a lot of prestige and is very much valued
(Vandekerckhove, 2009). Also, it has in recent decades expanded its geographical base De Schutter
and Nuyts (2005). Antwerp dialect has co-existed with two different standards for 200 years. French
used to be the language of education and public administration in Antwerp. It is only after WWII
that a more and more standardized form of Dutch came in its place.
The attitudinal relation between the Antwerp city dialect and the evolving Dutch oral standard has
been in constant flux (compare, e.g., Deprez et al., 1985; Vandekerckhove and Cuvelier, 2007). The
current study examines covert attitudes towards the Antwerp dialect and the oral standard on the
basis of child speech stimuli. This method offers a unique opportunity to assess adults’ degree of support for the continued use of the dialect, as buddingly present in the youngest members of the speech
community.
A formal attitude study investigated adults’ attitudes towards the speech of four-year-old children
living in the same community, i.e., the greater Antwerp area. Following the methodology for preparing
formal attitude studies outlined in Wölck (2007), the attitude instrument scales were determined on
the basis of interviews with members of the local speech community to ensure ethnographic validity.
The speech stimuli consisted of children’s spontaneous narrations of an animal picture book story.
In a first data collection wave 306 adults evaluated the speech of four children ; in a second wave, another 101 respondents rated a second set of four children. Social characteristics along which respondents’
attitudes were compared were age, gender, parental status and social class. None of these affected the
response patterns. Rather, response patterns varied significantly depending on the speech samples.
Although generally adults showed a generally positive stance towards all fouryear- olds, children’s dialect usage led to markedly negative attitudes whereas children’s use of the standard correlated with
more positive attitudes.
In their evaluations of child language, adults thus showed that they think it is more important for
children to know the standard than to know the dialect. These findings suggest that the historically
very high status of the Antwerp dialect is being eroded by the increasing status and acceptance of the
oral standard. In speaking to young children, adults in Antwerp generally try to avoid using dialect
patterns (?). This further illustrates the change towards standard Dutch. The increased acceptance of
the standard at the expense of the hitherto highly valued dialect may be explained in the framework
of a still ongoing standardization process that is very recent in comparison to other areas in Western
Europe. While dialect competence is still required for local community membership, knowledge of the
standard has become necessary for wider communication. In this situation, adults want to make sure
that children learn the standard, and see the dialect as being in the way. Time will tell whether the
still vibrant Antwerp dialect survives this push towards the exit.
Références
De Schutter, G. and Nuyts, J. (2005). Stadsantwerps. Lannoo, Tielt.
Deprez, K., De Schutter, G., and de Remiens, R. (1985). Stadsantwerps vs. Plattelandsantwerps vs.
AN : Een tweede attitude-onderzoek in Antwerpen. Taal en Tongval, 35 :166 – 198.
Vandekerckhove, R. (2009). Dialect loss and dialect vitality in Flanders. International Journal for the
Sociology of Language, 196/197 :73 – 97.
Vandekerckhove, R. and Cuvelier, P. (2007). The perception of exclusion and proximity through the
use of Standard Dutch, "tussentaal" and dialect in Flanders. In Du Plessis, T., Cuvelier, P., Meeuwis,
6
M., and Teck, L., editors, Multilingualism and exclusion :Policy, practice and prospects, pages 241
– 256. Van Schaik, Pretoria.
Wölck, W. (2007). Concepts, methods and contact linguistic universals. Plurilingua, 30 :51 – 60.
7
Child-directed speech and the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms
Colloquial Belgian Dutch in Flemish families
Eline Zinner1, Dorien Van De Mieroop1, Stefania Marzo1
1
KU Leuven
This paper presents a mixed methods approach to assessing how Flemish mothers and fathers use accommodation strategies and child-directed speech (CDS) to help their children acquire sociolinguistic
awareness concerning variants and varieties of Dutch (compare Smith et al. (2013)).
The long and complex standardization history of Dutch is responsible for an intriguing tension between norm and use in Flanders. For day-to-day communication, the Flemish rely on Colloquial Belgian Dutch (CBD), a supraregional, yet substandard variety of Dutch. CBD is lexically, morphophonologically and syntactically different from the standard language, which is itself characterized
by an exonormative orientation on the language of the North Zenner et al. (2009). Due to extensive
efforts from language policy makers, the Flemish are generally very aware of these differences between
their home language and the Northern Dutch norm Speelman et al. (2013).
An important perspective on current attitudes towards CBD (and, hence, on its future) can be gained
by focusing on the way in which parents use (or avoid) CBD features when talking to their children.
Specifically, we work with a corpus of 20 families from the provinces Flemish-Brabant and Antwerp,
ten of which come from a higher and ten from a lower socio-economic background Rowe (2008). All
children in the families were younger than ten. Each family provided us with four hours of data, recorded by the parents themselves during and around mealtime. After the final recordings, we conducted
a sociolinguistic interview with mother and father.
The data, transcribed according to CHILDES’s CHAT-conventions MacWhinney (2000) were coded
for four contextual factors (speaker, hearer, emotion and speech act) and for four CBD features.
Specifically, we included two stereotype variables (second person pronoun and adnominal flexion for
masculin forms) and two indicator variables (word-final t-deletion and h-procope) Labov (1994).
The alternations are analyzed both quantitatively (via regression analyses) and qualitatively (via discourse analysis). First, our regression models reveal stronger variation in the mothers’ CBD use than
in that of the fathers. Where fathers are typically rather consistent in their language use, mothers shift
their variant use when adopting a pedagogical role. Children are more frequently addressed with the
standard variant, partners with CBD variants. This alternation is by no means absolute, and specifically the mother-child conversations show clear variation between CBD and the standard variants. Our
contextual factors can help explain this attested variation (with stronger patterns for the stereotype
variables than for the indicator variables).
Together with the qualitative analyses of the sociolinguistic interviews, our results offer a unique perspective on standard language and standard language ideology in Flemish households. It appears that,
more than aiming to teach their children standard language, mothers aim to help their children acquire sociolinguistic awareness Smith et al. (2013). This way, our study underlines the existing tension
between norm and use, but at the same time, it emphasizes how both can and do co-exist in Flanders.
Références
Foulkes, P., Docherty, G. J., and Watt, D. (2005). Phonological variation in child-directed speech.
Language, 81(1) :177 – 206.
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of linguistic change. Internal factors, volume 1. Blackwell, Oxford.
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project : Tools for Analyzing Talk, volume 1. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah (NJ).
Plevoets, K., Speelman, D., and Geeraerts, D. (2008). The distribution of T/V pronouns in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch. In Schneider, K. P. and Barron, A., editors, Variational Pragmatics, pages
181 – 209. John Benjamins, Amsterdam / Philadelphia.
8
Rowe, M. L. (2008). Child-directed speech : Relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of child
development and child vocabulary skill. Journal of Child Language, 35 :185 – 205.
Smith, J., Durham, M., and Richards, H. (2013). The social and linguistic in the acquisition of
sociolinguistic norms : Caregivers, children and variation. Linguistics, 51(2) :285 – 324.
Speelman, D., Spruyt, A., Impe, L., and Geeraerts, D. (2013). Language attitudes revisited : Auditory
affective priming. Journal of Pragmatics, 52 :83 – 92.
Zenner, E., Geeraerts, D., and Speelman, D. (2009). Expeditie Tussentaal : Leeftijd, identiteit en
context in "Expeditie Robinson.". Nederlandse Taalkunde, 14 :26 – 44.
9
La liaison variable en français L1 et L2, une étude contrastive de
son acquisition
1
Mylène Harnois-Delpiano1
Univ. Grenoble Alpes, LIDILEM, F-38040 Grenoble
La liaison en français consiste en l’apparition d’une consonne de liaison entre deux mots (mot1 et mot2)
dans des contextes précis de la chaîne parlée qui sont divisés en deux catégories : les contextes où la
liaison est catégorique et ceux où elle est variable Durand et al. (2011). La liaison variable (dorénavant
LV) fonctionnant comme variable sociolinguistique, son taux de réalisation chez l’adulte francophone
dépend du statut social et de la situation d’énonciation (pour une revue, Nardy (2008) : 104-118). Les
apprenants adultes de français langue étrangère et seconde (dorénavant L2) l’auraient bien compris
puisque Howard Howard (2005) relève une surgénéralisation de la non réalisation de la LV chez des
L2 anglophones, ce qui leur permettrait de faire natif et familier, au même titre que l’effacement du
“ne” de négation.
Récemment, de nouvelles recherches ont érigé la liaison en objet interdisciplinaire reliant linguistique
et psycholinguistique. Contrairement au modèle phonologique de l’acquisition de la liaison qu’elle propose chez les enfants francophones natifs (dorénavant L1), Wauquier Wauquier (2009) penche pour un
modèle lexical chez des L2 alphabétisés au début de leur apprentissage, proche du modèle constructionniste que Chevrot, Dugua & Fayol Chevrot et al. (2009) ont eux décrit chez des L1 de 2 à 6 ans. En
effet, elle suppose que les L2 retiendraient prioritairement une stratégie lexicale, et opèreraient ensuite
une généralisation leur permettant de former une représentation phonologique unifiée de la consonne
de liaison, ce qui passerait notamment par une exposition répétée à de nombreux contextes de liaison.
La différence majeure qui opposerait les L2 aux L1 serait alors leur connaissance de la représentation
orthographique des mots induisant la liaison Chevrot et al. (2013).
Cette communication se propose de présenter une étude contrastive concernant la production et le
jugement d’acceptabilité de LV dans des contextes identiques «adjectif + nom» chez des L1 âgés de 2
à 6 ans, et chez des L2 coréens qui ont été au centre d’un suivi longitudinal durant un an. Le protocole
expérimental repose sur la sollicitation de productions à l’aide de tâches de dénomination d’image.
S’agissant des jugements d’acceptabilité, nous avons mis en oeuvre une tâche opposant des séquences
comportant une liaison réalisée à une liaison non réalisée.
La discussion portera sur l’analyse des résultats selon deux axes. Premièrement, nous exposerons comment nous avons comparé des résultats en production et des résultats en jugement d’acceptabilité,
pour déterminer par exemple une avance des uns sur les autres. Nous verrons aussi comment nous
avons comparé les deux groupes de sujets sachant qu’on ne peut ni faire correspondre des durées
d’apprentissage (L2) à un âge de développement (L1), ni confondre les capacités d’apprentissage d’apprenants adultes et de jeunes enfants.
Deuxièmement, nous nous intéresserons aux résultats eux-mêmes. Chez les L2, l’absence d’aphérèse
(‘un petit ordinateur’ produit /oẽ petidinatoeK/), la faible fréquence de substitutions (‘un gros éléphant’ produit /oẽ gKonelefã/) ainsi que la non réalisation massive de la LV qui décroît significativement sont autant de résultats que l’on retrouve inversés chez les L1 non lecteurs. Nous discuterons
l’éventualité que ces différences résultent de l’input écrit et de l’explicitation.
Références
Chevrot, J.-P., Dugua, C., and Fayol, M. (2009). Liaison acquisition, word segmentation and construction in French : A usage-based account. Journal of Child Language, 36(03) :557 – 596.
Chevrot, J.-P., Dugua, C., Harnois-Delpiano, M., Siccardi, A., and Spinelli, E. (2013). Liaison acquisition : Debates, critical issues, future research. Language Sciences, 39 :83 – 94.
Durand, J., Calderone, B., Laks, B., and Tchobanov, A. (2011). Que savons-nous de la liaison aujourd’hui ? Langue française, 169(1) :103 – 135.
10
Howard, M. (2005). L’acquisition de la liaison en français langue seconde. Une analyse quantitative
d’apprenants avancés en milieu guidé et en milieu naturel. CORELA, (Numéros - thématiques,
Colloque AFLS).
Nardy, A. (2008). Acquisition des variables sociolinguistiques entre 2 et 6 ans : Facteurs sociologiques
et influences des interactions au sein du réseau social. Thèse de doctorat, Université Stendhal,
Grenoble.
Wauquier, S. (2009). Acquisition de la liaison en L1 et L2 : Stratégies phonologiques ou lexicales ?
Aile... Lia, 2 :93 – 130.
11
The role of L1 interference in the acquisition of sociolinguistic
variation in L2 : the case of [t,d] deletion among Polish migrants in
Edinburgh
Agata Daleszynska1, Miriam Meyerhoff2
Edge Hill University, 2Victoria University of Wellington
1
Recent studies investigating the acquisition of variation in the context of migration have highlighted
several factors which contribute to the successful acquisition of local variation patterns by second
language learners, such as the social indexicality of variants, the degree of contact with native-speakers,
or migrants’ attitudes toward the host country Drummond (2013, 2012); Meyerhoff and Schleef (2012);
Schleef et al. (2011). In the current paper we take this issue a step further, and assess the role of
speakers’ first language (L1) in the process. Specifically, we investigate the acquisition of word-final
consonant cluster simplification ([t,d] deletion, e.g. Guy (1980)) by 16 teenage Edinburgh-based Polish
migrants.
The production of word-final voiced obstruents in English is particularly challenging for Polish speakers
since in Polish final obstruent voicing is almost categorically non-contrastive, meaning that all wordfinal obstruents are produced as voiceless (1), (2) (Slowiaczek and Dinnsen (1985) : 328).Therefore, in
the [+voice] word-final obstruent cluster in English, devoicing of [d] (rather than deletion) is expected
among Polish learners (3), (4).
(1)
zjazd [zjast] (gathering)
(2)
skarb [skarp] (treasure)
(3)
Poland [pVlVnt]
(4)
cold [kVlt]
We explore to what extent the Polish devoicing rule interferes with the acquisition of [t,d] deletion by
Polish learners of English. Using quantitative methods we assess two scenarios :
i) [d] deletion is the extension of obstruent devoicing (Fig. 1a). (Analogically to Labov’s Labov
(1969) model of copula deletion where copula deletion is modelled as the extension of copula
contraction)
ii) [d] deletion and obstruent devoicing are two separate processes (Fig. 1b). (Analogically to the
straight contraction and deletion process proposed by Rickford et al. Rickford et al. (1991) for
copula deletion)
Furthermore, we compare the constraints on [t,d] deletion among Polish speakers with the results
obtained for their Edinburgh-born teenagers.
Our results indeed show strong L1 interference, but only at the surface frequency level of variant
distribution. However, at the level of phonological constraints, we observe a very close replication of
the native-speakers’ pattern of [t,d] deletion. In other words, whereas Polish migrants still “sound”
Polish in the pronunciation of consonant clusters in English, the process of devoicing does not seem to
interfere with the acquisition of [t,d] deletion (which suggests that these processes are independent of
each other). Moreover, results of multivariate analysis show that Polish adolescents have mastered the
local underlying system of [t,d] deletion which is evident through the replication of local constraints
on this process. We believe that these results challenge the importance of L1 transfer as the primary
determinant of the successful acquisition of variation patterns in L2 Bruhn de Garavito and White
(2000). Instead, our results suggest that it is mainly the exposure to the target language which determines the strength of L1 interference, and consequently, makes a difference in how “local” one sounds.
Références
Bruhn de Garavito, J. and White, L. (2000). The second language acquisition of Spanish DPs : The
status of grammatical features. In Pérez-Leroux, A. T. and Liceras, J. M., editors, The acquisition
12
of Spanish morphosyntax : The L1/L2 connection, pages 153 – 178. Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Dordrecht.
Drummond, R. (2012). Aspects of identity in a second language : ING variation in the speech of Polish
migrants living in Manchester, UK. Language Variation and Change, 24 :107 – 133.
Drummond, R. (2013). The Manchester Polish STRUT : Dialect acquisition in a second language.
Journal of English Linguistics, 41 :65 – 93.
Guy, G. R. (1980). Variation in the group and the individual : The case of final stop deletion. In
Labov, W., editor, Locating language in time and space, pages 1 – 36. Academic Press, New York.
Labov, W. (1969). Contraction, deletion, and inherent variability of the English copula. Language,
45 :715 – 762.
Meyerhoff, M. and Schleef, E. (2012). Variation, contact and social indexicality in the acquisition of
(ing) by teenage migrants. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 :398 – 416.
Rickford, J. R., Ball, A., Blake, R., Jackson, R., and Martin, N. (1991). Rappin on the copula
coffin : Theoretical and methodological issues in the analysis of copula variation in African American
Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change, 3 :103 – 132.
Schleef, E., Meyerhoff, M., and Clark, L. (2011). Teenagers’ acquisition of variation : A comparison
of locally-born and migrant teens’ realisation of English (ing) in Edinburgh and London. English
World-Wide, 32 :206 – 236.
Slowiaczek, L. and Dinnsen, D. A. (1985). On the neutralizing status of Polish word-final devoicing.
Journal of Phonetics, 13 :325 – 341.
1a. Deletion as extension of devoicing Labov (1969) :
1b. Deletion independent of devoicing (Rickford et al. 1991) :
13
Regional Accent Variation in the L1 and L2 : How do early
bilinguals and late L2-learners deal with it ?
1
Saioa Larraza1, Catherine Best2
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 2Marcs Institute and School of Humanities &
Communication Arts, University of Western ; Haskins Laboratories
Listeners are exposed to highly variable speech input in their everyday life, especially when they
live in an area where different languages and many non-native speakers cohabitate. This does not
necessarily cause perceptual problems, however, as studies show that they perceptually adjust to a
talker’s socio-phonetic characteristics Ladefoged and Broadbent (1957). In this study we examine the
perceptual adaptation of early and late bilinguals to regional accents in their L1 and L2. We use a
cross-linguistic approach that exploits the multilingual accent variation present in Sydney : Australian
English speakers are in frequent contact with many languages, Italian among others. We tested two
groups of native speakers of Australian English who learned Italian (L2) at different ages (3 and 18
years, respectively), in two tasks targeting different levels of representation of the target phonemic
contrasts : pre-lexical phonetic level versus lexical level.
The first part of the study focuses on phonemic contrasts that operate differently in L1-English regional varieties, comparing the realization of the /T/-/f/, /D/-/v/, /l/-/w/ contrasts by Australian
and British English. Specifically, the Manchester (UK) accent phonologically neutralizes the voiced
and voiceless interdental versus labio-dental fricative contrasts /T/>/f/ and /D/>/v/, and the alveolar
lateral versus labio-velar approximants /l/>/w/, in post-vocalic positions (VCV and VC#), although
for /l/>/w/ some phonetic difference may be retained (near-merger) especially in medial intervocalic
(VCV) position. First, we analyzed how well listeners distinguish these phones in both English accents
in an AXB Discrimination task using non-word /VCV/ stimuli. Then, exchanges of these contrasts
were presented in English words in the context of an Auditory Lexical Decision task (LDT), to see
whether Australian listeners detect and activate lexical items as rapidly and accurately in Australianas in Manchester-accented variants.
The same procedure was used for Italian (L2). Australian English-Italian early and late bilinguals were
tested in the same two tasks with Italian phonemic contrasts that operate differently in the Standard
Italian (SI) accent familiar to the Australian bilinguals, and the unfamiliar Friuli accent of Italian.
SI uses singleton versus geminate consonant length contrasts, e.g., /l/-/l :/ and /r/-/r :/, which are
neutralized toward the singleton in the Friuli accent. The palatalised versus non-palatalised contrasts
/l/-/L/ (laterals) and /n/-/ñ/ (coronal nasals) were used as a basis of comparison between the two
accents versus the L1, as these contrasts are maintained in both accents do not exist in English.
The results lead us to conclude that both groups of bilingual listeners in Australia automatically
adjusted to dialectal variation in the L1, English. Nevertheless, the early Australian English-Italian
bilinguals and the late L2-Italian learners treated L2 regional accent variation differently. Phoneticperceptual salience influenced the extent to which the two groups of listeners discriminated contrasts
(AXB) and recognized lexical variants (LDT) : phonemic contrasts that are harder to discriminate
create larger spurious activations at the word level. We conclude that 1) on-line adjustment mechanisms operate when listening to accented speech both in the L1 and L2, and 2) the earlier the L2
has been acquired the more automatically and efficiently listeners apply those perceptual adjustments.
Références
Ladefoged, P. and Broadbent, D. E. (1957). Information conveyed by vowels. J Acoust Soc Am, 29 :98.
14
Acquiring attitudes towards varieties of Dutch. A quantitative
perspective
Gunther De Vogelaer1
University of Münster
1
Even though adolescence is well-known to be a key period for the acquisition of vernacular varieties,
there seems to be little research on how attitudes change during adolescence. In addition, most sociolinguistic studies on adolescent language hardly discuss developmental factors. This study tries to
amend for these gaps in our knowledge, by investigating how attitudes towards a number of varieties of
Dutch change in Flemish children between 8 and 18 years old, using the speaker evaluation paradigm
(as revitalized lately in publications such as Kinzler and DeJesus (2013); Kristiansen and Grondelaers
(2013)). The results show adolescence to be a period in which attitudes further emerge and change
considerably. The youngest children in our sample do seem to recognize Standard Dutch as a model for
their own speech, and are thus competent to distinguish between different varieties of Dutch, but they
hardly attribute any non-linguistic significance to language variation. As children grow older, they
realize that there is a correlation between language variation and societal prestige. In addition, they
become more sensitive to the ‘covert prestige’ of, especially, the local variety, which is increasingly
evaluated as indexing integrity and as a means towards social and/or in-group success. A number
of significant parallels are revealed between sociolinguistic and psychosocial development, including
11-12-year-olds’ tendency to think in terms of ‘perceived popularity’ Cillessen and Rose (2005), and
the peak around the age of 16 in conventional and social-clique dominated reasoning about friendship
Horn (2003); Turiel (1983).
Références
Cillessen, A. H. N. and Rose, A. J. (2005). Understanding Popularity in the Peer System. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 14 :102 – 110.
Horn, S. (2003). Adolescents’ reasoning about exclusion from social groups. Developmental Psychology,
39 :11 – 84.
Kinzler, K. D. and DeJesus, J. M. (2013). Children’s sociolinguistic evaluations of nice foreigners and
mean Americans. Developmental Psychology, 49 :655 – 664.
Kristiansen, T. and Grondelaers, S. (2013). Language (De)standardisation in Late Modern Europ :
Experimental Studies. Copenhagen.
Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge : Morality and convention. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
15
What hinders the acquisition of schwa alternation ?
1
Helene N. Andreassen1
UiT The Arctic University of Norway
In French, schwa can surface as [oe] or be absent from the phonetic output of the word without changing its meaning, e.g. seconde [sœgÕd] vs. [sgÕd] ‘second ;f’. Schwa has already been subject to a large
amount of studies, which have concluded that the rate of alternation depends on a variety of intraand extra-grammatical factors (cf. Andreassen (2013) for an overview).
Recent data suggest that schwa alternation is subject to diatopic variation. Comparing judgment data
collected in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and Nantes (France), Racine Racine (2008) shows that the Swiss
French accept more readily the variant without schwa than do the Hexagonal French. The acceptance
of variants without schwa is further attested in Swiss French production data : data from the PFC1
investigation point in Neuchâtel reveal a 70% schwa absence in spontaneous speech Racine and Andreassen (2012).
Children growing up in a Swiss French community are thus exposed to an important frequency of
variants without schwa, and one could expect that production of reduced variants starts early. A field
work targeting Swiss French children (aged 2 ;3–3 ;2) indicates a far more intricate path of acquisition. Recording both spontaneous and semi-controlled speech, the author observes that, in an overall
fashion, children prefer the variant with schwa.
This paper, which is a result of the first comprehensive study on the acquisition of schwa, discusses the
factors blocking the children’s production of variants without schwa. Assuming the behaviour of schwa
in child language is intimately linked to the development of the phonological grammar in general, we
search to determine this link by testing the data against two challenges in the acquisition of phonology
emphasised in previous work, i.e. consonant sequencing and non-prominent syllable deletion.
Although exceptions occur, the data first indicate a link between the acquisition of primary and
secondary clusters, the former being a prerequisite for the latter. Second, the data indicate an important level of faithfulness to the syllable count : In particular among the younger children, a vowel –
target-like or non-target-like in quality – is realised in the schwa position, seemingly independently of
the faithfulness to the surrounding consonants, e.g. remorque [K(œ)mOKk] → [amOk] ‘trailer ;f’. These
findings by far identify schwa alternation as a phenomenon acting as and interacting with other challenges in acquisition, which develop in their own way, regardless of the frequency of structures in the
input.
Références
Andreassen, H. N. (2013). Schwa : Distribution and acquisition in light of Swiss French data. Phd
dissertation, University of Tromsø.
Racine, I. (2008). Les effets de l’effacement du schwa sur la production et la perception de la parole
en français. Phd dissertation, Université de Genève.
Racine, I. and Andreassen, H. N. (2012). A phonological study of a Swiss French variety : Data from
the canton of Neuchâtel. In Gess, R., Lyche, C., and Meisenburg, T., editors, Phonological variation
in French : Illustrations from three continents, pages 173 – 207. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
1
For information and references, see www.projet-pfc.net
16
Influence du milieu social sur la production de liaisons dans l’input
parental : Étude exploratoire de corpus denses
1
Damien Chabanal1, Loïc Liégois1
Laboratoire de Recherche sur le Langage - Clermont Université
La liaison facultative est une des variables sociolinguistiques qui, ces dernières décennies, a été la
plus étudiée pour ses usages par l’adulte Ågren (1973); Lucci (1983); Mallet (2008). Au niveau de
l’acquisition de la liaison et de ses liens avec le milieu social, des études plus récentes Chabanal (2003);
Nardy (2008) font état d’une influence précoce de l’environnement sociolinguistique de l’enfant sur
la vitesse d’acquisition des liaisons variables et catégoriques. Cependant, ces études n’ont jusqu’alors
observé que le parler des enfants avec comme variable l’appartenance sociale des parents, sans prendre
en compte leurs productions.
Cette étude propose d’observer l’influence du milieu social sur la réalisation des liaisons catégoriques
et variables en croisant productions parentales et enfantines. Pour nos analyses, nous exploitons les
données recueillies dans le cadre du projet ANR Phonlex : il s’agit de corpus denses enregistrés en
situation naturelle d’interaction entre deux fillettes âgées de 36 mois et leurs deux parents respectifs
(7 heures d’enregistrement par fillette). Les deux couples de parents appartiennent à deux catégories
socioprofessionnelles différentes, définies selon la méthodologie mise en place par Genoud Genoud
(2011). Les parents de Lola appartiennent à la classe moyenne inférieure alors que les parents de
Salomé appartiennent à la classe moyenne supérieure.
Alors que, quantitativement, les parents de Lola et Salomé produisent un nombre similaire de contextes
de liaisons, nos données font apparaître des différences à deux niveaux :
• Concernant la liaison variable, le taux de réalisation relevé dans les productions des parents
de Lola (3%) est significativement plus faible que celui observé dans les données des parents
de Salomé (10,7%). Cette différence est également observable dans les productions des deux
fillettes : en sept heures d’enregistrement, Lola ne réalise que quatre liaisons variables (2,1% des
contextes) tandis que le taux relevé dans les productions de Salomé dépasse les 8%.
• Concernant la liaison catégorique, nous notons un fort degré de figement des contextes de liaisons
catégoriques dans l’input reçu par Lola. Le degré de figement est calculé en fonction du rapport
nombre de mots1 / nombre de formes différentes de mots2. Ainsi, si nous relevons cinq emplois
du mots1 des en contextes de liaison avec les deux mots2 ours et arbres, le taux de figement
sera de 2,5 (5/2). Selon nous, la différence observée est due au fait que nous avons extrait
des productions des parents de Lola un nombre important de liaisons réalisées après des verbes
employés à l’impératif (prends et vas par exemple). Ces mots1, très fréquents dans les productions
des parents de Lola, sont combinés avec un nombre très limité de mots2 différents.
Dans la suite de notre communication nous exposerons, au moyen d’analyses sur la fréquence et la variété des mots1, des mots2 et des collocations mot1-mots2, comment l’input parental semble influencer
les productions enfantines.
Références
Ågren, J. (1973). Étude sur quelques liaisons facultatives dans le français de conversation radiophonique. Uppsala University Press, Uppsala.
Chabanal, D. (2003). Un aspect de l’acquisition du français oral : La variation sociophonétique chez
l’enfant francophone. Thèse de doctorat, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier.
Genoud, P. A. (2011). Indice de position socioéconomique (IPSE) : Un calcul simplifié. Université de
Fribourg, Fribourg.
17
Lucci, V. (1983). Étude phonétique du français contemporain à travers la variation situationnelle.
Publications de l’Université des Langues et Lettres de Grenoble, Grenoble.
Mallet, G. (2008). La liaison en français : Descriptions et analyses dans le corpus PFC. Thèse de
doctorat, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense.
Grenoble.
18
Attitudes towards and awareness of language variation in pre-school
children in Austria
1
Irmtraud Kaiser1
University of Salzburg
The Bavarian-speaking part of Austria is often cited as a prime example of the so-called dialectstandard continuum. People living in this area can use a range of speech forms between the extremes
of (Austrian) Standard German and the respective base dialect (cf. Ammon (2003); Ender and Kaiser
(2009); Kaiser and Ender (2013); Wiesinger (1992)). The individual linguistic repertoire is determined by the geographical and social/educational background of each speaker. In each communicative
situation, factors such as (in)formality and type of interlocutor affect the choice of speech forms from
the individual repertoire. The linguistic variety chosen, however, does not only serve to convey verbal information but it also carries sociosymbolic meaning by way of associations with its speakers.
In Austria, speakers using dialect are usually perceived as more natural, relaxed, honest, likeable,
friendly and as having a better sense of humour when compared to speakers of standard (Austrian)
German. On the other hand, they are typically also perceived as less educated, less intelligent, serious,
and sophisticated (cf. Soukup (2013) ; cf. also Moosmüller (1988) and Steinegger (1998) for similar
results).
But when and how exactly do children acquire the knowledge about the sociosymbolic value of sociolinguistic varieties in their L1 speech community ? Little is known about the acquisition of sociolinguistic
variation in Austrian children in general and even less so about their attitudes towards and awareness
of language variation. Data from other countries indicate that this social knowledge is acquired fairly
early, i.e. some time between the ages of 3 (cf. Rosenthal (1973) for US-American children) and 8
years (Häcki Buhofer et al. (1994) for Swiss-German speaking children ; Cremona and Bates (1977)
for Italian children) – the exact age perhaps correlating with the everyday presence and importance
of sociolinguistic varieties in the country or region.
For this reason, we selected a very young age group for the present study : children in kindergarten
between three and six years of age. The questions the present paper seeks to answer are the following :
What do Austrian preschool children know about language variation in Austria ? Are they (aware of)
varying their own speech ? What are their attitudes towards (speakers of) dialect and the standard
language ? Are there any significant age differences between 3-year-olds and 6-year-olds ? And which
are the most influential variables in shaping these attitudes (parents, kindergarten teachers, peers,
media, etc. ?).
Different data sources are integrated : among them background questionnaires filled in by the parents
and kindergarten teachers, brief interviews with the children, and importantly, adapted ‘matchedguise’ experiments. It was one of the methodological challenges of the present study to develop a
matched-guise task feasible for even very young children. The resulting data give insight into children’s perceptions of linguistic varieties, their attitudes towards them and their self-assessed usage.
This procedure – for the first time – provides an empirically founded account of Austrian preschool
children’s sociolinguistic attitudes and awareness.
Références
Ammon, U. (2003). Dialektschwund, Dialekt-Standard-Kontinuum, Diglossie : Drei Typen des Verhältnisses Dialekt - Standardvarietät im deutschen Sprachgebiet. In Androutsopoulos, J. K. and
Ziegler, E., editors, "Standardfragen". Soziolinguistische Perspektiven auf Sprachgeschichte, Sprachkontakt und Sprachvariation, pages 163 – 171. Peter Lang, Frankfurt.
Cremona, C. and Bates, E. (1977). The development of attitudes toward dialect in Italian children.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 6/3 :223 – 232.
Ender, A. and Kaiser, I. (2009). Zum Stellenwert von Dialekt und Standard im österreichischen und
19
Schweizer Alltag - Ergebnisse einer Umfrage. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik, 37(2) :266 –
295.
Häcki Buhofer, A., Burger, H., Schneider, H., and Studer, T. (1994). Früher Hochspracherwerb in der
Deutschen Schweiz : Der weitgehend ungesteuerte Erwerb durch sechs- bis achtjährige Deutschschweizer Kinder. In Burger, H. and Häcki Buhofer, A., editors, Spracherwerb im Spannungsfeld von
Dialekt und Hochsprache, pages 147 – 198. Peter Lang, Bern, Berlin.
Kaiser, I. and Ender, A. (2013). Diglossia or dialect-standard continuum in speakers’ awareness and
usage. On the categorisation of lectal variation in Austria. In Pütz, M., Reif, M., and Robinson, J.,
editors, Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main.
Moosmüller, S. (1988). Dialekt ist nicht gleich Dialekt : Spracheinschätzung in Wien. Wiener Linguistische Gazette, 40 - 41 :55 – 80.
Rosenthal, M. S. (1973). The acquisition of children’s awareness of language differences. PhD dissertation, Georgetown University.
Soukup, B. (2013). Austrian dialect as a metonymic device : A cognitive sociolinguistic investigation
of Speaker Design and its perceptual implications. Journal of Pragmatics, 52 :72 – 82.
Steinegger, G. (1998). Sprachgebrauch und Sprachbeurteilung in Österreich und Südtirol : Ergebnisse
einer Umfrage. Peter Lang, Frankfurt/M.
Wiesinger, P. (1992). Zur Interaktion von Dialekt und Standardsprache in Österreich. In van Leuvensteijn, J. A. and B.Berns, J., editors, Dialect and Standard Language in the English, Dutch, German
and Norwegian Language Areas, pages 290 – 311. Elsevier, Amsterdam et al.
20
Wednesday 3 December 2014
Poster Session
21
Documenting and Understanding Language Change in the
Acquisition of Endangered Languages : Neuter Pronouns in Picard
Julie Auger1, Amber Panwitz1
1
Indiana University
While language transmission to new generations is known to play a major role in language change,
little attention has been paid to situations of language endangerment, especially where endangered
languages are closely related to the dominant language. Yet, such situations provide opportunities
to explore questions best investigated when differences are limited. For instance, to what extent can
learners reassemble feature matrices Lardiere (2009) when native and target systems contain cognates
with differing distributions ? Are some features more easily acquired than others ? What changes occur
when input is insufficient or the heritage variety is a second language ? While second dialect acquisition research (e.g., Chambers (1992); Tagliamonte and Molfenter (2007); Anderson (2011)) can answer
some of these questions, the distinct social setting of endangered languages warrants investigation.
This paper investigates Picard’s neuter pronoun system with two goals : completing its documentation
using corpus data from native speakers with differing exposure to their native language, and examining
its acquisition by French speakers. Auger Auger (2009) identifies two Picard neuter pronouns, ch and
a. Contrary to French ce and ça, which are considered allomorphs of the same morpheme Zribi-Hertz
(1994), the Picard pronouns occur in complementary distribution based on predicate type : a occurs
with adjectival (1a), verbal, and adverbial predicates, and ch with all other predicates (PP in (1b)). We
propose that the predicate’s lexical feature activating a is [+Verb] Chomsky (1975). Other predicates
are assigned the default ch. Furthermore, a undergoes allophonic variation, phonetically deleting to Ø
before non-high vowels as in (1c). Auger Auger (2009) established general distribution patterns, but
did not distinguish between older and younger native-speaker data, or native and second-languagelearner data. Our paper will fill this gap.
In addition, we will test native Picard speakers and advanced and intermediate learners, gathering
psycholinguistic, experimental data from online and offline Grammaticality Judgment Tasks (GJTs)
completed in French and Picard. GJTs include two stimulus sets in a 2x2 design. Stimulus set 1, (2–3)
below, tests the lexical feature [+Verb], manipulating pronoun and predicate type. Pronoun conditions
are (a) Ø vs. (b) ch. Predicate conditions are adjectival(1) vs. nominal(2). Set 2, (4–5) below, tests the
phonological distribution, manipulating allophonic variants (a) a and (b) Ø, and phonetic contexts
_C (1) vs. _V [-high](2). French equivalents in (3) and (5) are all grammatical and involve only stylistic
variation.
Auger’s Auger (2011) advanced learners’ accuracy was near-ceiling, especially in self-monitored, written
data ; crucially, in oral-production data, ch is employed most frequently, but at only 91.2% accuracy,
followed by Ø at 95.5% and a at 97.2%—indicative of the default pattern. In our data, we expect highest error rates that involve accepting default choices. In GJTs, this means untarget-like acceptance
of (2a2) in set 1 and (4a2) in set 2.
While minority languages in France have long faced adversity, recent support provides hope for their
short-term survival. However, impoverished learning environments will likely affect their structure.
Our paper, combining extensive corpus analysis and psycholinguistic tasks, will document a rather
subtle type of change and cast light on its causes.
22
Examples
(1) a. Mais tout o a n’est mie grave. (Vasseur, 2003 : 114)
‘But all that it is not serious.’
b. Tout o ch’est à nous. (Vasseur, 2003 : 4)
‘All that it is ours.’
c. Tout o Ø est bieu. (Vasseur, 2003 : 538)
‘All that it is beautiful.’
(2) Stimulus set 1 : Syntactic variation for Picard
(a1) Un tchurè est tojours rétu.
(a2) * Un tchurè ch’est tojours rétu.
(b1) * Un tchurè est tojours un homme.
(b2) Un tchurè ch’est tojours un homme.
(3) Stimulus set 1 : Stylistic Variation for French
(a1) Un curé est toujours gentil.
(a2) Un curé c’est toujours gentil.
(b1) Un curé est toujours un homme.
(b2) Un curé c’est toujours un homme.
(4) Stimulus set 2 : Allophonic Variation for Picard
(a1) Un tchurè a doit prêcheu tous les jours.
(a2) * Un tchurè a aime pérleu à z’gins.
(b1) * Un tchurè doit prêcheu tous les jours.
(b2) Un tchurè aime pérleu à z’gins.
(5) Stimulus set 2 : Stylistic Variation for French
(a1) Un curé ça doit dire la messe tous les jours.
(a2) Un curé ça aime parler aux gens.
(b1) Un curé doit dire la messe tous les jours.
(b2) Un curé aime parler aux gens.
Références
Anderson, V. M. (2011). Bidialectalism in Intense Language Variety Contact : An "Unexpected"
development in the Death of Pennsylvania Dutchified English. Ph.d. dissertation, Indiana University.
Auger, J. (2009). Two neuter pronouns in Picard. Unpublished Manuscript. Indiana University Bloomington.
Auger, J. (2011). The Impact of Language Revival on Linguistic Structure : Neuter Subject Pronouns
in Picard. Linguistics, (2) :39 – 17.
Chambers, J. K. (1992). Dialect Acquisition. Language, 33 :673 – 705.
Chomsky, N. (1975). The logical structure of linguistic theory. Plenum, New York.
Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25 :173 – 228.
Tagliamonte, S. A. and Molfenter, S. (2007). How’d you get that accent ? Acquing a second dialect of
the same language. Language in Society, 36 :649 – 675.
Vasseur, G. (2003). Lettes à min cousin Polyte. F. Paillart, Abbeville.
Zribi-Hertz, A. (1994). La syntaxe des clitiques nominatifs en français standard et en français avancé.
Travaux de linguistique et de philologie, 32 :131 – 147.
23
Adult learners’ (non-)acquisition of speaker-specific variation
1
Carla Hudson Kam1
University of British Columbia
Variation in language is sometimes learned, but other times, is changed as learners acquire a language.
Studies of naturalistic language learning provide many hints as to why variation is sometimes learned
and other times changed, but due to the complexity of the world, it can be difficult to pinpoint the
crucial variables. Artificial language methodologies (MALs) can be quite useful in this regard, as they
allow one to control all aspects of the learning situation. Numerous MAL studies have been conducted
to understand the conditions under which learners fail to acquire variation (and in so doing change the
language), but much less work has investigated the conditions under which variation is learned, mostly
because the MAL work has generally not been concerned with sociolinguistic variation, a situation
that is changing.
Hudson Kam Hudson Kam (2012), for instance, examined the acquisition of conditioned vs. unconditioned variation in adults and children. Despite the fact that variation conditioned on linguistic
variables is more complicated (since it requires learning multiple probabilities rather than a single
one), both children and adults were able to learn the conditioned variation. This contrasts with the
unconditioned variation, which children generally changed. The present study takes these findings
and extends them to the acquisition of socially-conditioned variation. It represents a first step at
understanding how learners may acquire different patterns of variation associated with
different types of individuals, by assessing whether adults, (who have been shown to easily acquire variable patterns, Hudson Kam (2012); Hudson Kam and Newport (2005,
2009)) learn patterns associated with particular speakers. Associating patterns with particular speakers is one way learners might gain entry into socially-conditioned variation, especially before
they have a good understanding of the social categories indexed by the variation (as may be the case
with young children).
Method : 19 adults were exposed to a MAL containing a probabilistically occurring grammatical
morpheme (the articles). The articles occurred with subject and object nouns with different probabilities (the syntactically-conditioned pattern shown to be learnable by Hudson Kam, 2012). There were
two different female speakers with easily discriminable voices, each of whom produced the articles
according to a different set of probabilities : one speaker produced articles more often with subjects
than object, the other did the opposite. The question was whether learners would acquire the
speaker-specific probabilities.
There were 8 exposure sessions, each lasting 3̃0 minutes. In each, the learner watched a video which
was accompanied by spoken sentences in the MAL. Each exposure speaker produced half of the exposure sentences. In an additional test session, participants were asked to produce sentences describing
novel scenes. Test productions were prompted using a single word produced by either 1) one of the
exposure voices or 2) a novel (also female) voice.
Results : Learners did not produce articles in a way that indicated they had learned the
speaker specific probabilities, suggesting that learners may need a more social variable to
index variation to, i.e., that speaker-specific patterns are not enough. Follow-up studies are required
to investigate this further.
Références
Hudson Kam, C. L. (2012). Examining children’s learning of variation in a miniature artificial language.
Paper presented "Variation in Language Acquisition (ViLA 2012)".
Hudson Kam, C. L. and Newport, E. L. (2005). Regularizing Unpredictable Variation : The Roles of
Adult and Child Learners. Language Formation and Change. Language Learning and Development,
1 :151 – 195.
24
Hudson Kam, C. L. and Newport, E. L. (2009). Getting it right by getting it wrong : When learners
change languages. Cognitive Psychology, 59 :30 – 66.
25
A dynamic approach on the acquisition of allophones : a Brazilian
Portuguese Case Study
Thaïs Cristófaro Silva1, Maria de Fátima de Almeida Baia2, Daniela Mara Lima Oliveira Guimarães3
1
UFMG, Brazil, 2UESB, Brazil, 3UFOP, Brazil
This study describes phonological development of stops and affricates in two varieties of Brazilian
Portuguese (BP). Affricates in BP are assumed to be allophones of alveolar stops reflecting a palatalization process whose trigger is a high front vowel. That is, an affricate occurs when the preceding
vowel is [i]. In palatalizing varieties affricates occur in forms such as [tSia] ‘aunt’ or [dZia] ‘day’ whereas
in non-palatalizing varieties an alveolar stops occurs preceding [i] : [tia] ‘aunt’ or [dia] ‘day’. Affricates
are complex segments which reflect the combination of a stop and a fricative. Thus, in order to produce
an affricate the child should be able to combine the production of a stop and a fricative. In this paper
we investigate the acquisition of affricates in a palatalizing variety of Belo Horizonte and compare the
results to the non-palatalizing variety of São Paulo. Our main research question could be formulated
as : what are the potential trajectories to acquire an affricate in BP ? Our main purpose is thus to
investigate the emergence of affricates in first language acquisition.
In order to answer our research question we examined two longitudinal corpora. The first corpus was
collected from children born and raised in Belo Horizonte and comprised three boys and one girl who
were typically developing children (data collection for 12 month, monthly, in 2007). The second corpus
was collected from children born and raised in São Paulo and comprised three male children from São
Paulo who were typically developing children (data collection for 12 month, monthly, in 2009). Both
corpora were organized as part of independent PhD studies and although there were methodological
differences between them we assume that they both may be taken into consideration to compare the
acquisition of affricates in BP.
Our theoretical foundation follows the emergentist approach to phonological development within Dynamic Systems Theory (Thelen & Smith 1994, Kelso 1995, Larsen-Freeman & Cameron 2008, KerenPortnoy et al., 2011) and the Whole- Word/Templatic Phonology (Vihman & Croft, 2007).
The data examined showed intra and inter-dialect variability in phonological development amongst
speakers through different paths or trajectories which expressed the strategies children had in order to
try to construct the category ‘affricates’. Put it in other words we may say that the interplay categories
are not just alveolar stops and affricates but rather a wide variety of articulatory targets. We will show
that children’s production of either alveolar stops or affricated depends primarily on the community
they are inserted. We will also show that in our data the progression towards an affricate and the regression to an alveolar stops were strategies adopted in both varieties. We discuss these results in the
light of dynamic systems arguing that the perceptionproduction relationship may provide an elegant
account to allophonic variation.
26
Capacité de discrimination codique d’enfants réunionnais : analyse
d’une épreuve d’identification linguistique
1
Audrey Noël1
Université de la Réunion - LCF EA 4549
L’enfant plurilingue discrimine très tôt les langues de son environnement : dès quatre jours, le nourrisson, sensible aux propriétés acoustiques (intonation, prosodie...), réagit au changement linguistique
Mehler and Dupoux (2006). La discrimination codique serait ainsi essentielle et innée : sans elle,
l’enfant plurilingue développerait un code mixte et ne pourrait distinguer ses langues Ramus (1997).
L’étude d’Adelin Adelin (2008, 2013), portant sur des enfants réunionnais scolarisés en fin de maternelle, montre pourtant qu’une grande majorité d’enfants discriminent difficilement le français du
créole. Ce phénomène semble lié à la singularité de la situation linguistique réunionnaise : le français
et le créole, deux langues structurellement proches, sont fréquemment entremêlés dans les usages linguistiquesPrudent (1981); Souprayen-Cavery (2010); Lebon-Eyquem (2010).
Nous pouvons alors nous questionner sur la discrimination codique en contexte plurilingue, où des
langues proches sont quotidiennement mélangées dans l’input linguistique, et également nous interroger sur le lien entre non-discrimination et difficultés langagières. Traitant cette problématique sous un
angle psycholinguistique, nous répondrons à deux questions majeures :
• Si les enfants réunionnais en fin de maternelle discriminent difficilement leurs langues, à partir
de quel âge cela est-il possible ?
• Si les enfants non-discriminants présentent des difficultés langagières, les enfants avec difficultes
langagières averees sont-ils tous non-discriminants ?
Nous avons repris le protocole élaboré par Adelin Adelin (2008), composé de trois sous-parties (discrimination français / créole, français / mélange et créole / mélange). Un code couleur est établi pour
chaque langue ; l’enfant peut alors soit désigner une couleur, soit nommer le code de l’énoncé. Nous
avons proposé ce protocole à 13 enfants réunionnais âgés de 5 ans 4 mois à 10 ans 7 mois. 8 sujets présentent un développement langagier typique (DT), et 5 présentent un trouble langagier (TL). Chaque
enfant a été rencontré individuellement, dans différents contextes (domicile, cabinet d’orthophonie...).
Les résultats montrent que les enfants en fin de maternelle sont effectivement de faibles discriminants ;
l’épreuve est réussie dès le CP pour la majorité des sujets. Tous les enfants TL présentent quant à
eux des difficultés de discrimination. Enfin, la capacité à discriminer mélange / créole s’avère la plus
complexe à acquérir, tandis que la discrimination français / créole est la première acquise.
Quelles peuvent être les raisons de cette difficulté à discriminer ? Le protocole utilisé demande une
discrimination, mais également une identification de la langue, ce qui fait peut-être appel à des capacités cognitives plus complexes et non acquises par de jeunes enfants. L’appui sur les propriétés
acoustiques peut également être insuffisant en contexte réunionnais, étant donné la perméabilité des
langues, aussi bien sur un plan grammatical que prosodique. Enfin, mentionnons l’influence du facteur
sociolinguistique, qui biaise probablement le jugement des sujets : la survalorisation du français peut
être à l’origine d’erreurs de nominalisation ou d’un désintérêt pour la tâche.
Cette recherche apporte quelques éclairages et de nouvelles interrogations quant à la capacité de discrimination et d’identification codique. Il serait intéressant de reproduire l’étude à plus grande échelle
pour conforter ou infirmer les hypothèses posées.
Références
Adelin, E. (2008). Créole et français de petits écoliers réunionnais. Prolégomènes à l’évaluation de
langues proches. Thèse de doctorat, Université de la Réunion, La Réunion.
Adelin, E. (2013). Evaluer en deux langues des elèves de grande section de maternelle à La Reunion.
Impact du contexte sociolinguistique. Glottopol, 22 :8 – 46.
27
Lebon-Eyquem, M. (2010). Productions interlectales réunionnaises dans la dynamique créole-français.
In Blanchet, P. and Martinez, P., editors, Pratiques innovantes du plurilinguisme : émergence et
prise en compte en situations francophones, pages 83–96. Ed. des archives contemporaines, Paris.
Mehler, J. and Dupoux, E. (2006). Naître humain. Odile Jacob, Paris.
Prudent, L. F. (1981). Diglossie et interlecte. Langages, 15(61) :13 – 38.
Ramus, F. (1997). Le rôle du rythme pour la discrimination des langues. Actes des JIOSC 97, 97 :225
– 229.
Souprayen-Cavery, L. (2010). L’interlecte réunionnais. L’Harmattan, Paris.
28
Tableau 1 : Epreuve de discrimination codique : protocole de passation
Introduction de
l’épreuve
Partie 1
Partie 2
Partie 3
L’examinateur interroge sur la (les) langue(s) que l’enfant parle (chez lui, avec ses
pairs...). Il dispose deux tas de jetons de deux couleurs sur la table, représentant
chacune une langue.
Discrimination français / créole
L’enfant peut soit désigner un tas de jetons, soit
(10 items)
nommer directement la langue de l’item.
Discrimination français / mélange
On dispose deux tas de jetons (un de même
(6 items)
couleur, un mélangeant les deux couleurs).
L’enfant désigne un tas ou nomme la langue.
Discrimination créole / mélange
Idem partie 2.
(6 items)
Tableau 2 : Sujets de l’étude et résultats
Sujets1
SAI
MAR
ALA
GAE
JUN
SIM
GAU
VAL
JEN
EST
DON
MAI
ANT
Age
5 ;4
5 ;5
5 ;7
6
6 ;5
8 ;2
8 ;11
9 ;11
9 ;11
9 ;11
10 ;7
10 ;3
10 ;4
Classe
GSM2
GSM2
GSM2
GSM2
CP
CE2
CE2
CE2
CM1
CM1
CM1
CM2
CM2
DT3 vs TL4
TL
DT
TL
DT
DT
DT
DT
DT
TL
TL
TL
DT
DT
Moyenne
Partie A /10
8
10
5
9
10
10
10
10
10
3
8
10
10
8,69
29
Partie B /6
3
6
4
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
5,62
Partie C /6
3
3
1
2
6
6
6
4
5
2
5
6
2
3,92
Total /22
14
19
10
17
22
22
22
20
21
11
19
22
18
18,23
Usages de vingt enfants et de leur entourage à l’île de La Réunion :
input et output dans une communauté créole
1
Mylène Lebon-Eyquem1
Université de La Réunion
La situation sociolinguistique de l’île de Réunion est caractérisée par des mélanges courants et originaux et des frontières floues entre les langues. Les Réunionnais s’expriment parfois en français (il a
lancé la balle à Zoé) souvent en créole (lu la anvoy le boul Zoé) et de plus en plus dans un « parler
mélangé ». Les productions hybrides sont constituées d’alternances codiques (lu la anvoy la balle
à Zoé) ou se font plus originales et imprévisibles : la discrimination des codes en présence est alors
difficile voire impossible. Ainsi, dans « lu la lans le boul à Sophie », certains segments créoles (« lu
», « le boul ») et français (« à Sophie ») sont clairement identifiables, mais « la lans » composé du
marqueur pré-verbal créole « la » associé au morphème lexical « lans » peut-être aussi bien français
que créole. Pour rendre compte de ces formes intermédiaires métisses, le concept d’interlecte Prudent
(1981) a été adopté. Les enfants sont exposés très tôt à ces productions et il s’agit de déterminer comment ils parviennent à construire leur compétence linguistique et pragmatique dans un environnement
langagier caractérisé par sa variabilité et sa mouvance.
Lors des premiers travaux concernant le développement langagier dans ce milieu plurilingue LebonEyquem (2007), il a été en évidence qu’un des facteurs essentiels qui favorise l’acquisition du vocabulaire et de la morpho-syntaxe chez les enfants de 4 à 6 ans ayant des pratiques hybrides, est la capacité
à discriminer les codes et à associer une langue ou une variété de langue à une situation de communication. Dans ce travail, nous souhaitons approfondir cette recherche et nous centrer sur l’acquisition
de ces règles d’usage, à l’aide d’une observation longitudinale de 36 mois, auprès de 20 enfants âgés de
3 ans au début du suivi. Notre principale théorie de référence est l’approche dite « basée sur l’usage
» de Michael Tomasello Tomasello (2003) reposant sur une conception fonctionnaliste et prenant en
compte les apports de l’approche cognitive et de l’approche interactionniste. Nous examinerons plus
particulièrement l’impact de l’école et de l’environnement social sur la maîtrise des normes d’emploi
au sein des échanges. Conformément à la méthodologie variationiste, l’analyse de données est concentrée sur une variable, les formes verbales qui permettent de classer les productions en 3 catégories :
le français, le créole et les formes interlectales (alternances codiques, formes hybrides imprévisibles et
formes métisses interlinguales comme « il té i frappe Sophie » où les marqueurs pré-verbaux créoles
« té i » se substituent à la désinence de l’imparfait).
Les résultats montrent que les enfants ajustent leurs formes verbales à celles utilisées par leur entourage lorsque l’enjeu pragmatique très fortement lié à l’idéologie diglossique, s’avère important. En
outre, ces travaux confirment que la capacité à discriminer les langues en présence constitue un facteur essentiel lors de l’acquisition langagière dans un milieu où les frontières entre les codes sont floues.
Références
Adelin, E. (2008). Créole et français de petits écoliers réunionnais. Prolégomènes à l’évaluation de
langues proches. Thèse de doctorat, Université de la Réunion, La Réunion.
Lebon-Eyquem, M. (2007). Une approche du développement langagier de l’enfant réunionnais dans la
dynamique créole-français. Thèse de doctorat, Université de La Réunion, La Réunion.
Lebon-Eyquem, M. (2010). Evolution et impact de l’école et de l’environnement social sur les usages
de 4 enfants de 3 ans en milieu créole. Actes du colloque CMLF 2010.
Prudent, L. F. (1981). Diglossie et interlecte. Langages, 15(61) :13 – 38.
30
Prudent, L. F. (1993). Pratiques langagières martiniquaises : genèse et fonctionnement d’un système
créole. Thèse de doctorat d’etat, Université de Rouen - Hautes Normandie.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language : A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge. Massachussetts. England.
Tomasello, M. (2004). Aux origines de la cognition humaine. Paris, edition originale, 1999 edition.
31
Self-organization and variability in the acquisition of Brazilian
Portuguese vowel system
Vera Pacheco1, Maria de Fátima Baia1, Marian Oliveira1
1
Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia
This paper aims at analysing the emergence of vowel system in the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) in order to analyse inter and intra-speaker variability in early acquisition. We
follow the dynamic perspective of phonological development (Thelen and Smith, 1994; Kelso, 1995;
Vihman et al., 2008), which understands language development as a process of evolution characterised
by variability. The perspective emphasises that variety, flexibility and asynchrony tend to occur in
the developmental process. Also, it stresses the continuity between the development of phonological
structure and the development of all other structures in nature (Szreder-Ptasinska, 2012). Furthermore, according to this view, although there is instability in development there are adjustments in
the system due to the self-organization principle, which can be understood as a spontaneous pattern
formation (Kelso 1995).
This study hypothesizes that variability will be observed in the data regarding the path each child
takes in the development of vowel system in the transition from babbling to words as the phonological
system is understood as an open, dynamic and unstable system (Szreder 2012). Despite the fact that
variability is expected in inter and intra-child development, we hypothesize that there will be moments
of optimization of vowels inventories caused by self-organization as Boer (2000) observes in a computer
simulation study on the emergence of vowel system.
We analyse longitudinal data of babbling (b) and early words (w) of two male children from the city
of Sao Paulo (Brazil) (Santos, 2005) : (1) A. 0 ;10 – 0 ;11 (b) / 1 ;5-1 ;6 (w1) / 1 ;11 - 2 ;0 (w2), 8
sessions/months ; (2) G. 0 ;10 – 2 ;0 (b) / 1 ;5-1 ;6 (w1) / 1 ;11 - 2 ;0 (w2), 8 sessions/months. The
vowels analysed were [a, i, u] and 5 productions of each vowel were analysed per session, resulting
the total of 180 productions. The vowels analysed were produced in stressed syllables with obstruent
consonants in coda position. The productions were analysed by using the free software Praat (Boersma
and Weenink, 2006). The acoustic parameters taken into consideration for the analysis of vowels were
F1 and F2.
The data showed different F1 and F2 values in babbling and words of both children, for instance, in
general, F1 value of [a] in A data was characterized by an approximate rate of 704 Hz (b) > 598 Hz
(w1) > 816 Hz (w2), whereas F2 value showed less variation between babbling and first words with
an approximate rate of 1202 Hz (b) > 1024 Hz (w1) > 1849 Hz (w2). Moreover, in the comparison
between A and G data, we observed that G showed less variation than A of F1 and F2 values of [a,i,u]
across sessions.
We observed intra and inter speaker variability in F1 and F2 values in the development of BP vowel
system. Children acquiring the same dialect show different paths in the acquisition of vowel system.
Nevertheless, although there is variability, the system organizes itself due to its inherent ability to
create new patterns, i.e. due to self-organization principle.
Références
Boersma, P. and Weenink, D. (2006). PRAAT : doing phonetics by computer (version 4.4.23).
Kelso, J. S. (1995). Dynamic patterns : The self-organization of brain and behavior. MIT press,
Cambridge.
Santos, R. S. (2005). A Aquisição do Ritmo em Português Brasileiro. Projeto USP.
Szreder-Ptasinska, M. (2012). Child Phonology as a Dynamic System. Phd thesis, University of York.
Thelen, E. and Smith, L. B. (1994). A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and
action. MIT press, Cambridge.
32
Vihman, M., DePaolis, R. A., and Keren-Portnoy, T. (2008). Babbling and word : a dynamic systems
perspective on phonological development. In Fletcher, P., editor, Handbook of Child Language, pages
163–182. Cambridge Univeristy Press, Cambridge.
33
Thursday 4 December 2014
Oral Session
34
The social turn in child multilingual acquisition studies : The role of
input
1
Elizabeth Lanza1
Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing)/University of Oslo
With reference to the study of bi/multilingual acquisition in children, Ortega Ortega (2013) calls for a
bi/multilingual turn in late second language acquisition research in which studies address the whole individual and his/her linguistic repertoires, and not just the second language. Studies of bi/multilingual
acquisition in children, on the other hand, can be said to have undergone a social turn, with studies
increasingly addressing the impact of social factors and variation in the child’s linguistic environment
on the child’s development of two or more languages (cf. Bridges and Hoff (2014); Ghimenton et al.
(2013); Pearson (2007)). The study of child language acquisition has been the domain of developmental psycholinguistics, which has also dominated research on bilingual and multilingual acquisition in
children, with a focus on the language-internal and individual cognitive mechanisms at play in the
acquisition process. Some developmental psycholinguists bridge the gap between their discipline and
sociolinguistics by studying variation and social meaning as an inherent part of the acquisition process
(cf. Chevrot and Foulkes (2013); De Houwer (2011)). The ultimate question is Why do some children
exposed to two or more languages acquire these languages while others do not ? An important issue in
this regard concerns the input these young children receive and what characterizes the nature of this
input. Although the social turn has manifested itself in the current child bi-/multilingual acquisition
research landscape, earlier studies espousing an interactional language socialization approach also attempted to bridge the gap (cf. Döpke (1992); ?). Moreover, the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of
family language policy aims to draw on anthropology, sociolinguistics as well as developmental psycholinguistic approaches to studying childhood bilingualism and multilingualism (King and Fogle (2013)).
In my talk I will outline the various trends and distinct perspectives in the evolving social turn
in the study of early bilingualism, examining the explicit and implicit epistemological assumptions,
particularly in regard to the study of input. My focus will be on bi-/multilingual first language acquisition although I will also bring in early childhood second language acquisition. This critical overview
will assess what we currently know about why some children exposed to two or more languages acquire
these languages while others do not. In conclusion, a projection will be made of the current potentials
for bridging the gap between more psycholinguistically/cognitively-oriented approaches and more sociolinguistically oriented approaches to the study of early bilingualism in children.
Références
Bridges, K. and Hoff, E. (2014). Older sibling influences on the language environment and language
development of toddlers in bilingual homes. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35(2) :225 – 241.
Chevrot, J.-P. and Foulkes, P. (2013). Special issue “Language acquisition and sociolinguistic variation”. Linguistics, 51(2).
De Houwer, A. (2011). Language input environments and language development in bilingual acquisition. Applied Linguistics Review, 2 :221 – 240.
Döpke, S. (1992). One Parent One Language. An Interactional Approach. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Ghimenton, A., Chevrot, J.-P., and Billiez, J. (2013). Language choice adjustments in child production
during dyadic and multiparty interactions : A quantitative approach to multilingual interactions.
Linguistics, 51(2) :251 – 254.
King, K. and Fogle, L. W. (2013). Family language policy and bilingual parenting. Language Teaching.
Surveys and Studies, 2 :172 – 194.
35
Lanza, E. (1997/2004). Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism : A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Ortega, L. (2013). SLA for the 21st Century : Disciplinary progress, transdisciplinary relevance, and
the bi/multilingual turn. Language Learning, 63(1) :1 – 24.
Pearson, B. (2007). Social factors in childhood bilingualism in the United States. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28 :399 – 410.
36
The dynamics of standard–dialect variation in acquiring and using
German as a second language
1
Andrea Ender1
University of Fribourg / HEP Fribourg
As learning to manage the communicative needs in a second language were not difficult enough for
adult language users, grasping the socially meaningful aspects of language variation bears another
important challenge in the acquisition and use. For second language learners, the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a target language and the development of the capacity to alternate between
speech styles do not seem to be straightforward (cf. Rehner, Mougeon, and Nadasdi 2003 ; Romaine
(2004); Howard et al. (2013)). Second language learners and users in the German–speaking part of
Switzerland are constantly confronted with the coexistence of different language systems – local dialect(s) and the standard variety Berthele (2004); Christen et al. (2010); Werlen (1998). This special
sociolinguistic setting foregrounds the otherwise often neglected topic of acquisition of variation in
German as a second language and calls for a more detailed examination of the dynamics of cognitive
and social aspects in second language acquisition.
This paper focuses on how second language users perceive the relative importance and the status of
standard and dialect, and produce variation between the standard and dialectal linguistic systems.
Results of an empirical study of 20 immigrants to the German–speaking part of Switzerland whose
language acquisition process has been mostly untutored are presented. The examination of speech
data taken from recordings of an interview situation with a standard Swiss German speaker and also
a speaker of the Bernese dialect is combined with content-related insights into their experiences with
and attitudes towards learning and using the dialect and the standard (Swiss) German. The analysis of the speech data consists of determining the relative amount of dialect, standard language and
mixed speech addressed to both interlocutors. Some learners prefer and mostly use standard language,
whereas others opt mostly for the dialect ; some learners also frequently mix the two linguistic systems. Very interestingly, some but not all second language users are sensitive to the language choice
of the interlocutor ; that is, they substantially change their usage of dialect or standard language
according to the variety used by the interlocutor (see the figure on the second page). This paper
therefore investigates the quality and quantity of different usage patterns displayed in the learners’
speech and also adresses the question of the (un)systematicity of mixing-andmatching standard and
dialect. The added content-related level can illuminate possible individual choices and underlying evaluations on the learners’ side and serve as important hints for socio-cognitive explanations why many
second language users only approach, but do not reach the native-like coordinated use of dialect and
standard. By investigating which knowledge tends to be gained, and it what way it is used in social
interaction, this study improves our understanding of the acquisition of variation in a second language.
Références
Berthele, R. (2004). Vor lauter Linguisten die Sprache nicht mehr sehen - Diglossie und Ideologie in
der deutschsprachigen Schweiz. In Christen, H., editor, Dialekt, Regiolekt und Standardsprache im
sozialen und zeitlichen Raum, pages 111 – 136. Edition Praesens, Vienna.
Christen, H., Guntern, M., Hove, I., and Petkova, M. (2010). Hochdeutsch in aller Munde. Eine
empirische Untersuchung zur gesprochenen Standardsprache in der Deutschschweiz. Zeitschrift für
Dialektologie und Linguistik ; Beihefte 140. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart.
Howard, M., Mougeon, R., and Dewaele, J.-M. (2013). Sociolinguistics and second language acquisition.
Oxford University Press, New York.
Romaine, S. (2004). Variation. In Doughty, C. and Long, M. H., editors, The Handbook of Second
Language Acquisition, pages 409 – 435, Malden, MA. Blackwell.
37
Werlen, I. (1998). Mediale Diglossie oder asymmetrische Zweisprachigkeit ? Mundart und Hochsprache
in der deutschen Schweiz. Babylonia, 1 :22 – 35.
Figure 1. Usage of the standard and dialect variety by five exemplar L2 users talking with the interviewer who speaks a local Swiss dialect (dial.), and the interviewer who speaks the standard variety
(std). The analysis is performed on the utterance level and not on the level of individual items, an
utterance being defined as a complete or elliptic main or subordinate clause, a unit of speech that is
oriented towards a prosodic, semantic-pragmatic or syntactic caesura.
38
Acquisition of morphosyntactic variation in a bilingual setting :
Children’s Spanish subject pronoun expression in the U.S. Pacific
Northwest
Acquisition of morphosyntactic variation in a bilingual setting : Children’s Spanish subject pronoun
expression in the U.S. Pacific Northwest Naomi Shin1, Jackelyn VanBuren1
1
University of New Mexico
Scholars of language acquisition have proposed that features involving the interface between syntax
and discourse-pragmatics represent a ‘vulnerable’ area of grammar, and that this is precisely where
bilingual and monolingual language acquisition will diverge (e.g. Sorace, 2012; Sorace and Serratrice, 1995). The variable use of subject pronouns has played a prominent role in this theory ; it has
been argued that bilinguals overproduce subject pronouns and use them in pragmatically ‘infelicitous’ contexts(Montrul and Sánchez-Walker, ming; Silva-Corvalán, 2014, ming; Sorace, 2012; Sorace
and Serratrice, 1995). Nevertheless, researchers who investigate Spanish subject pronoun expression
from a variationist perspective have found that the probabilistic, systematic grammar underlying subject pronoun expression is strikingly consistent across monolingual and bilingual adult communities
(Flores-Ferrán, 2004; Otheguy and Zentella, 2012; Travis, 2007; Torres Cacoullos and Travis, 2011).
The current study addresses the question of whether bilingual acquisition of morphosyntax differs from
monolingual acquisition by examining Spanish subject pronoun expression in sociolinguistic interviews
conducted with a) English-Spanish bilingual children of Mexican-descent residing in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, and b) monolingual Spanish-speaking children in in Mexico. For
the current study, children between the ages of six and nine (N = 17 bilinguals, 66 monolinguals) were
included. Tensed verbs occurring with or without a subject pronoun where either choice is possible
(i.e. ‘variable contexts’) were extracted from the interviews, yielding 2,116 tokens produced by the
bilingual children and 3,244 produced by the monolingual children. Mixed effects logistic regressions
– one for bilinguals and one for monolinguals – were performed using Rbrul (Johnson, 2009). The
regressions included one random factor (speaker) and five fixed factors routinely shown to constrain
adult pronoun use : Person/number of the verb, Switch-Reference, TMA, Clause type, and Reflexive.
Among adults, pronouns are more likely to occur 1) when the referent is singular, 2) when the referent
of two consecutive grammatical subjects is different (switch-reference) rather than the same, 3) with
verbs conjugated in the imperfect rather than other TMA forms, 4) in main rather than coordinate
clauses, and 5) with verbs occurring without a reflexive pronoun (e.g. Carvalho et al., ming).
Results for rates of expressed subject pronouns suggest that bilingual children produce higher rates
of pronouns than monolingual children do (13%, 8%, respectively). Nevertheless, results from logistic
regressions (see Table 1) indicate that the variable grammar underlying the distribution of pronouns
is quite similar among monolingual and bilingual children. First, the same three predictors significantly constrained pronoun among both groups : Person, Switch-reference, and TMA. Also, the three
predictors were selected in the same order, with Person ranked highest, followed by Switch-reference,
and third TMA. Second, the direction of the effects for each predictor variable was largely the same
for both groups of children. Therefore our study suggests that bilingual and monolingual acquisition
of morphosyntactic variation proceeds in much the same way. This finding supports the idea that
morphosyntax is relatively resistant to contactinduced change (e.g. Weinreich, 1968).
Références
Carvalho, A. M., Orozco, R., and Shin, N. L. (Forthcoming). Spanish Subject Pronoun Expression in
Spanish : A Cross-Dialectical Perspective. Georgetown University Press.
Flores-Ferrán, N. (2004). Spanish subject personal pronoun use in New York City Puerto Ricans :
Can we rest the case of English contact ? Language Variation and Change, 16 :49 – 73.
39
Johnson, D. E. (2009). Getting off the GoldVarb Standard : Introducing Rbrul for Mixed-Effects
Variable Rule Analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(1) :359 – 383.
Montrul, S. and Sánchez-Walker (Forthcoming). Subject Expression in Child and Adult Spanish
Heritage Speakers. In Carvalho, A., Rafael, O., and Lapidus Shin, N., editors, Spanish Subject
Pronoun Expression in Spanish : A Cross-Dialectical Perspective. Georgetown University Press.
Otheguy, R. and Zentella, A. C. (2012). Spanish in New York : Language contact, dialectal leveling,
and structural continuity. Oxford University Press.
Silva-Corvalán, C. (2014). Bilingual Language Acquisition : Spanish and English in the First Six Years.
Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Silva-Corvalán, C. (Forthcoming). The acquisition of grammatical subjects by Spanish- English bilinguals. In Carvalho, A. M., Orozco, R., and Shin, N. L., editors, Spanish Subject Pronoun Expression
in Spanish : A Cross-Dialectical Perspective. Georgetown University Press.
Sorace, A. (2012). Pinning down the Concept of Interface in Bilingual Development : A Reply to Peer
Commentaries. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2(2) :209 – 217.
Sorace, A. and Serratrice, L. (1995). Internal and External Interfaces in Bilingual Language Development : Beyond Structural Overlap. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2) :195 – 210.
Torres Cacoullos, R. and Travis, C. E. (2011). Testing convergence via code-switching : Priming and
the structure of variable subject expression. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15(3) :241 – 267.
Travis, C. (2007). Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish : Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change, 19 :101 – 135.
Weinreich, U. (1968). Languages in Contact Findings and Problems. Mouton & Co, The Hague ; Paris.
Constraints
Person
1sg
2sg
3sg
3pl
1pl
Reference
Switch
Same
TMA
Imperfect
Present
Preterit
Other
Imperative
Bilingual children (N Bbs=2,116)
N verbs % pro
Factor Weigth
Monolingual children (N Bbs=3,244)
N verbs % pro
Weight
686
110
731
310
279
17
11
15
7
4
.68
.49
.65
.41
.28
510
164
1354
967
249
19
17
8
4
2
.73
.78
.48
.29
.22
1020
1096
17
9
.61
.39
1432
1812
12
6
.60
.40
362
999
648
92
15
15
14
11
9
0
.96
.96
.94
.93
<.001
509
1080
1324
241
90
13
10
6
9
3
75
.58
.56
.52
.15
Table 1. Binary logistic regressions, predictors of monolingual and bilingual Spanishspeaking children’s
subject pronoun expression, ages 6-9
40
Variable interrogative structures in French L2-L2 informal discourse
1
Mark Black1
Indiana University Bloomington
L2 discourse competence often deviates from native speaker (NS) norms due to difficulty negotiating interfaces Sorace (2000) and overreliance on pedagogical norms. Higher-proficiency or near-native
speakers (NNS) may overcome these difficulties and pattern within NS norms concerning certain informal discourse markers Donaldson (2008). However, previous literature on L2 sociolinguistic variation
in French (with primarily intermediate-advanced learners) shows variable choice in interlocutor (p.
50), and few studies (cf. Dewaele (2004)) have addressed interlocutor L1 status as a potential factor
affecting production of stylistically-marked variation. Since L2ers are not necessarily constrained by
NS sociolinguistic norms in interaction with other L2ers, it is interesting to identify whether interlocutor L1 status influences NNS discourse and whether absence of a NS in the NNS-NNS communication
sphere necessarily leads to non-nativelike discourse (cf. Rehner and Mougeon (1999)).
Interrogative structures as stylistic variation in French (Table 1) have received attention in L1 Ashby
(1977); Coveney (2002) and L2 French Dewaele (1999); Sax (2003) sociolinguistic studies. The latter
studies found that L2ers overrely on formal structures, and while study-abroad and target community
exposure increase informal variant usage, this production still deviates from NS norms. The current
study’s research questions are thus : Are French NNSs capable of nativelike production of variable interrogative structures in informal discourse ? Does production differ in NNS-NS vs. NNS-NNS dyads ?
To address these questions, six L1-English speakers participated in an oral French production task.
All participants had been in France for over five years and on an acceptability judgment task scored within the range of NNSs profiled in Birdsong Birdsong (1992) and Donaldson Donaldson (2008).
After completing background questionnaires, participants were audio-recorded in two informal conversations : one with a French NS and another with a (L1-English) NNS. Interlocutors were recruited by
the NNSs, providing a high degree of social convergence Young (1988). The resulting corpus yielded
six hours of discourse consisting of 53,000 words, with 349 variable interrogative tokens.
NSs and NNSs alike produced informal interrogatives more frequently than in previous L1 (e.g., Coveney (2002)) and L2 French Dewaele (1999); Sax (2003) studies (Table 2). Compared to NSs, NNSs
slightly favored more formal [ESV] over [SV] in YNQ structures, though t-tests revealed no significant
between-group differences (p=.142), and use of WHQ structures was strikingly similar for both groups
(no significant between-group difference ; p=.455). Compared to previous L2 studies, NNSs produced
much higher frequencies of [SV], with no inversion, while WHQ structures patterned similar to Sax’s
Sax (2003) L2ers with long study-abroad experience.
Concerning interlocutor L1 effects (Table 3), NNSs showed slight but non-significant (p=.868) preference for less formal [SV] in YNQ contexts with NNS interlocutors compared to NS interlocutors.
However, NNSs strongly favored more formal [QESV] with NSs while preferring less formal [SVQ] with
NNSs ; this difference in WHQ variants across interlocutor types approached significance (p=.059).
The results support claims that certain L2ers can demonstrate nativelike usage of a stylistically-marked
discourse variable. In French interrogatives, this nativelike usage extends to NNS-NNS discourse, with
the present study reporting even higher levels of informality in NNS-NNS conversations (contra Dewaele (2004)).
Références
Ashby, W. (1977). Interrogative forms in Parisian French. Semasia, 4 :35 – 52.
Birdsong, D. (1992). Ultimate attainment in second language acquisition. Language, 68 :706 – 755.
Coveney, A. (2002). Variability in spoken French : A sociolinguistic study of interrogation and negation.
Elm Bank, Bristol, UK.
41
Dewaele, J.-M. (1999). Word order variation in interrogative structures of native and non-native
French. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 123 :161 – 180.
Dewaele, J.-M. (2004). Retention or omission of the ne in advanced French interlanguage : The variable
effect of extralinguistic factors. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8 :433 – 450.
Donaldson, B. (2008). Discourse competence in near-native speakers of French. PhD thesis, Indiana
University.
Rehner, K. and Mougeon, R. (1999). Variation in the spoken French of immersion students : To ne or
not to ne, that is the sociolinguistic question. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 56(1) :124
– 154.
Sax, K. (2003). Acquisition of stylistic variation in American learners of French. PhD dissertation,
Indiana University.
Sorace, A. (2000). Syntactic optionality in non-native grammars. Second Language Research, 16 :93 –
102.
Young, R. (1988). Variation and the interlanguage hypothesis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition,
10 :281 – 302.
42
Table 1. Variable interrogative structures in French (based on Coveney, 2002)
Function
Yes-No Questions
(YNQ)
Wh-Questions
(WHQ)
Type{a}
1. [SV]
2. [ESV]
3. [V-CL]
4. [SVQ]
5. [QSV]
6. [QESV]
7. [QV-CL]
8. [QV NP]
9. [Q=S V]
Example
Il est là ?
Est-ce qu’il est là ?
Est-il là ?
Elle s’appelle comment ?
Comment elle s’appelle ?
Comment est-ce qu’elle s’appelle ?
Comment s’appelle-t-elle ?
Comment s’appelle ta mère ?
Qui est là ?
Table 2. Frequencies of interrogative structures in NS and NNS.
Participants
NS
NNS
Overall
Coveney2002
(overall)
SV
94.3%
(83/88)
81.5
(119/146)
87.4
(228/261)
YNQ
ESV
5.7%
(5/88)
18.5
(27/146)
12.6
(33/261)
81.1
(77/95)
30.2
(32/103)
V-CL
0.0
n=
88
0.0
146
0.0
261
0.0
109
SVQ
58.3
(14/24)
58.5
(38/65)
58.5
(38/65)
QSV
16.7
(4/24)
14.6
(10/65)
15.4
(10/65)
WHQ
QESV
20.8
(5/24)
26.8
(16/65)
24.6
(16/65)
QV-CL
4.2
(1/24)
0.0
(1/65)
1.5
(1/65)
n=
24
50.0
(29/58)
27.7
(18/65)
48.6
(51/105)
5.8
(6/104)
111
41
78
Table 3. Frequencies of NNS interrogative structures in NS-NNS and NNS-NNS dyads.
NNSs
with NSs
with NNSs
Overall
Previous
L2 studies :
Dewaele
1999
Sax 2003
SV
79.0%
(64/81)
84.6
(55/65)
81.5
(119/146)
YNQ
ESV
21.0
(17/81)
15.4
(10/65)
18.5
(27/146)
49.5
40.7
V-CL
0.0
n=
81
0.0
65
0.0
146
9.8
214
SVQ
44.0
(11/25)
81.3
(13/16)
58.5
(24/41)
QSV
16.0
(4/25)
12.5
(2/16)
14.6
(6/41)
9.0
9.0
54.0
24.0
3.0
n/a
n/a
n/a
WHQ
QESV
40.0
(10/25)
6.3
(1/16)
26.8
(11/41)
QV-CL
0.0
n=
25
0.0
16
0.0
41
35.0
47.0
100
20.0
44.0
44.0
4.0
21.0
27.0
97
62
95
L2 status
Interm.Advanced
long SA
short SA
no SA
(not reported)
43
The Acquisition of Social and Grammatical Competence by Jakarta
Indonesian Children
Bernadette Kushartanti1, Hans Van de Velde2, Martin Everaert2
1
Fakultas Ilmu Pengetahuan Budaya Universitas Indonesia
2
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS
In the study of the acquisition of language variation, an important question which should be addressed is whether children acquire social and grammatical constraints simultaneously. This is the central
theme of our study of the acquisition of morphological variables in Bahasa Indonesia (BI) and Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian (CJI) by Jakarta Indonesian children.
Sixty three children, aged three to five, from three preschools and kindergartens in Jakarta were interviewed in two periods with a six months interval. In each period, each child was interviewed twice,
once in a formal and once in an informal setting. Speech data were collected by means of four scenarios.
By pointing out objects and asking questions, such as ‘what is/are X doing ?’, we tried to elicit the
children’s use of transitive and intransitive markers of BI verbs in the formal and CJI verbs in the
informal situation.
Children’s answers were coded on two dimensions : (i) whether they used the variety appropriate to
the situation ; and (ii) whether they applied a morphological rule marking transitivity or intransitivity.
It results in four types of answers, namely : (1) (+sit+rul), which means that the child uses the appropriate variety (BI in formal and CJI in informal), and uses the correct morphological rule for that
variety/situation ; (2) (-sit+rul), which means that the child does not use the variety to be used in
that situation, but that they use the morphological rule of the other variety correctly ; (3) (+sit-rul),
which means that the child uses the appropriate variety, but does not apply a correct morphological
rule ; and (4) (-sit-rul), which means that the child does not use the variety apt for the situation and
does not use a correct morphological rule.
We found that children in this study were already capable to use the morphological rules of transitive
and intransitive verbs of at least one of the varieties. Types (3) and (4) are rarely used by the children,
and our focus will be on the use of (+sit+rul) and (-sit+rul). Statistical analyses show that there is a
significant effect of situation and period. There is no significant effect of cohort and gender. Children
used (+sit+rul) in the informal situation over time, indicating the capability to assess the informal
situation and apply the morphological rule accordingly.
The finding is supported by the fact that it was CJI, used in the informal situation, to which Jakarta
children were still more exposed. Finding in this study is in line with what suggested by Kerswill
Kerswill (1996) and Smith et al. Smith et al. (2007), in that not all linguistic variables are acquired
at the same time and at the same way.
Références
Kerswill, P. (1996). Children, adolescents and language change. Language Variation and Change,
8 :177 – 202.
Kushartanti, B. (2014). The Acquisition of Stylistic Variation by Jakarta Indonesian Children. LOT,
Utrecht.
Roberts, J. (1994). Acquisition of Variable Rules : (-T, d) Deletion and (ing) Production in Preschool
Children. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Smith, J., Durham, M., and Fortune, L. (2007). "Mam, my trousers is fa’in doon !" : Community,
caregiver, and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect. Language Variation and
Change, 19(01) :63 – 99.
44
Pre-schoolers’ categorisation of speakers by regional accent
Ella Jeffries1, Paul Foulkes1, Carmen Llamas1
1
University of York
Adults can categorise speakers via variable properties of speech, e.g. inferring regional accent from a
speaker’s segmental pronunciations. How and when such abilities emerge is poorly understood. There
is some evidence that young children can distinguish segmental variables. Floccia et al. Floccia et al.
(2012) conclude that 20-month-olds raised in a rhotic environment were only able to recognise familiar
words spoken with a rhotic accent. Floccia et al. Floccia et al. (2009) found that 5-7-year-olds were
unable to group speakers into a local versus a non-local accent group. However, this study used sentence
stimuli, and thus grouping decisions cannot be narrowed down to particular segmental features.
Many important sociolinguistic skills are also developing in pre-school children. Ages 3-4 are ‘critical’
for language learning in general, including the learning of variation Roberts and Labov (1995). In
speech production this includes learning the pronunciation norms of the speech community, including
social and style-shifting patterns Foulkes et al. (1999); Smith et al. (2007); Barbu et al. (2013).
The present study takes another step towards understanding the process by which pre-school children
learn to group speakers by the segmental variables that separate regional accents.
20 nursery children from York participated in an accent grouping game. Children were presented with
a set of visual stimuli consisting of two cartoon character mothers and five ‘lost babies’ (Figure 1).
Each character spoke a short sentence containing one vowel variable that distinguishes northern from
southern accents (Table 1). The children’s task was to identify which babies belonged to which mother,
according to how they spoke. The stimuli were designed with three levels of difficulty, depending on
whether the same word and/or phoneme was spoken.
The study addresses the following questions :
(5)
can 3-4 year-olds group speakers by phonological variables indexing regional accents (difficulty
level 1) ?
(6)
can they do this when the phoneme is embedded in different words (difficulty level 2) ?
(7)
can they group speakers using different phonemes (difficulty level 3) ?
(8)
to what extent do these abilities improve with age ?
Figures 2 and 3 illustrate preliminary results from seven children. Figure 2 shows a significant correlation between age and correct responses (r=0.883, n=7, p<0.01). It also reveals a division between ages
3 and 4 : younger scored around chance level (50%), while older children scored well above chance.
Figure 3 shows the effect of difficulty level. Whereas the 3-year-olds scored above chance on difficulty
level 1(same word), they dropped to chance or lower for difficulty levels 2 and 3. The 4-year-olds also
showed a decline in ability across difficulty levels, although they always scored above chance. There is
also more variation for the 4-year-olds in difficulty level 3.
These results point towards a critical development between the ages of 3 and 4 in children’s ability
to group speakers according to segmental variables – earlier than reported by Floccia et al. Floccia
et al. (2009). Further analysis will also address the issue of parental accent. We hypothesise that the
children’s ability will not be significantly influenced by the local/non-local status of their parents’
accents, following Beck Beck (2014).
Références
Barbu, S., Nardy, A., Chevrot, J.-P., and Juhel, J. (2013). Language evaluation and use during early
childhood : Adhesion to social norms or integration of environmental regularities ? Linguistics,
51(2) :381 – 411.
Beck, E. L. (2014). The Role of Socio-indexical Information in Regional Accent Perception by Five to
Seven Year Old Children. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan.
45
Floccia, C., Butler, J., Girard, F., and Goslin, J. (2009). Categorization of regional and foreign accent
in 5-to 7-year-old British children. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 33(4) :366 –
375.
Floccia, C., Delle Luche, C., Durrant, S., Butler, J., and Goslin, J. (2012). Parent or community :
Where do 20-month-olds exposed to two accents acquire their representation of words ? Cognition,
124(1) :95 – 100.
Foulkes, P., Docherty, G. J., and Watt, D. (1999). Tracking the emergence of sociophonetic variation.
Paper presented at the Proceedings of The 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1-7
August 1999, San Francisco.
Roberts, J. and Labov, W. (1995). Learning to talk Philadelphian : Acquisition of short a by preschool
children. Language Variation and Change, 7(01) :101 – 112.
Smith, J., Durham, M., and Fortune, L. (2007). "Mam, my trousers is fa’in doon !" : Community,
caregiver, and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect. Language Variation and
Change, 19(01) :63 – 99.
Figure 1 : Example screen taken from the experiment
Table 1 : Difficulty levels of stimuli, with example words from the experiment
Difficulty level
Phoneme/word used by mother and children
1
Same phoneme embedded in
the same word
Same phoneme embedded in
different word
Different phoneme
embedded in different word
2
3
46
Example
Mother
Children
North
South
North
South
[a]
[A :]
[a]
[A :]
[baskIt]
[bA :skIt]
[baskIt] [bA :skIt]
[a]
[A :]
[a]
[A :]
[paT]
[pA :T]
[gôas]
[gôA :s]
[a]
[A :]
[e]
[eI]
[aft@nu :n] [A :ft@nu :n]
[ke :k]
[keIk]
Figure 2 : Correct response by child age
Figure 3 : Correct response by difficultly level
47
The content validity of Standard-German tests for assessing
language development in Swiss-German-speaking children
Constanze Vorwerg1, Andrea Pamela Willi1
1
University of Bern
In language assessment, there is often a gap between the assumed homogeneity of language as expressed in standard-language–based diagnostic tools, and the observed heterogeneity of language as found
in regionally, socially, and situationally variable language use.
Only recently have the results of research on diatopic, diastratic, and diaphasic variation started to
have an impact on the field of language disorders, as evidenced by publications, which describe this
development under the rubric of clinical sociolinguistics (Ball, 2005; Damico and Ball, 2008) – a development, which has been paralleled by endeavors to study questions at the interface of socio- and
psycholinguistics (e.g., Vorwerg, 2013), such as the acquisition of linguistic variation (e.g., Labov,
2013; Nardy et al., 2013; Roberts, 2005).
If standardized tests developed for standard language are used as a referent for evaluating the language of children who speak a different regional dialect, the first question to ask is whether those tests
have content validity for this specific variety in terms of covering the relevant linguistic patterns – in
addition to other aspects that build on this, such as the need of knowledge of the typical courses of
language development and the need of normative reference data.
In order to assess the content validity (in terms of linguistic patterns) of Standard-German tests used
in German-speaking Switzerland for the language assessment in Swiss-Germanspeaking children, we
analyzed relevant tests with respect to linguistic criteria of test development. The selection of tests and
sub-tests to be analyzed was based on a survey performed among Swiss-German speech therapists,
in collaboration with the Swiss-German Speech Therapist Association (DLV). The following tests
or subtests were chosen to cover the areas of productive and receptive phonology, vocabulary, and
morpho-syntax : AWST-R (active vocabulary), PDSS subsets : Sound Report, Phoneme Distinction,
Word Production Noun, Word Comprehension Noun, Comprehension of Syntactic Structures, Sentence Production, Production of Case Markings – Accusative, Production of Case Markings – Dative,
Production of Plural Markings), and TROG-D (receptive grammar).
For a goal-directed analysis, 10 linguistic criteria were developed in relation to the linguistic areas
aimed at in the PDSS (Kauschke and Siegmüller, 2010). Examples include number of syllables, phoneme positions in words, reversal of thematic roles, and coverage of case or plural forms.
Results reveal critical differences at all linguistic levels tested. Examples include phonemic structure
of translation equivalents (e.g., minimal pairs for phonemic distinction tasks), translation equivalents with vs. without plural markings, coverage of different plural markers, word meanings (false
friends, one-to-many translations), accusative/nominative syncretism in Swiss German with effects
onto relative-clause distinction and topicalization, word length in syllables, articulation difficulty, and
word structure.
The results – which show that a simple translation or transfer is not possible for all test words or
sentences – are discussed with respect to the need for developing a specific diagnostic tool for Swiss
German, the demands and criteria for test construction, together with the current problems of lack of
data for judging word frequency, item difficulty, and item discrimination.
Examples
(9)
Relative sentence with accusative (a) vs. nominative (b) in Standard German :
(a) Der Hund, den die Kuh jagt, ist braun. [The dog is chasing the cow is brown.]
(b) Der Hund, der die Kuh jagt, ist braun.[The dog is being chased by the cow is brown.]
(10)
Relative sentence with agent/patient ambiguity in Swiss (Bernese) German :
(c) Der Hung, wo d Chue jagt, isch bruun. [ambiguous between sentence meanings a & b]
(11)
Number of syllables : Swiss (Valais) German vs. Standard German
48
(d) Bänz – Tannenzapfen (1-4) [fir cone]
Tirigriff – Klinke (3-2) [handle]
Fiebermässer – Fieberthermometer (4-6) [clinical thermometer]
(12)
Consonant word onset with vs. without consonant cluster : Swiss vs. Standard German :
(e) schtrählu – kämmen (+cluster - -cluster) [to comb]
lismu – stricken (-cluster - +cluster) [to knit]
Références
Ball, M. J., editor (2005). Clinical sociolinguistics. Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Damico, J. S. and Ball, M. J. (2008). Clinical sociolinguistics. In Ball, M. J., Perkins, M. A., Müller,
J., and Howard, S., editors, The handbook of clinical linguistics, pages 107 – 129. Blackwell, Malden,
MA.
Kauschke, C. and Siegmüller, J. (2010). Patholinguistische Diagnostik bei Sprachentwicklungsstörungen
(PDSS). Urban & Fischer, München, 2nd edition.
Labov, W. (2013). Preface : The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. Linguistics, 51(2) :247 – 250.
Nardy, A., Chevrot, J.-P., and Barbu, S. (2013). The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation : Looking
back and thinking ahead. Linguistics, 51(2) :255 – 284.
Roberts, J. (2005). Acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. In Ball, M. J., editor, Clinical sociolinguistics, pages 153 – 164. Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Vorwerg, C. (2013). Language variation and mutual adaptation in interactive communication : Putting
together psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. In Wachsmuth, I., de Ruiter, J., Jaecks,
P., and Kopp, S., editors, Alignment in communication : Towards a new theory of communication,
Advances in Interaction Studies, pages 149 – 165. Benjamins, Amsterdam.
49
Gender and age as cues in adult social language learning
1
Péter Rácz1, Jennifer Hay1
New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour
This paper discusses the results of a psycholinguistic experiment on adult learning of socially cued
linguistic variation. During the training phase, for a set of nonce words, participants have to learn the
diminutive form of the word, formed by suffixation. The word is presented by a virtual interlocutor.
The allomorph of the suffix is determined by a cueing attribute of the interlocutor. During the test
phase, participants have to extend the pattern to new words and new interlocutors.
Our results show that participants are able to learn the pattern when it is cued by a socially relevant
attribute, such as the age (adult–child) or gender (female–male) of the interlocutor. They can also
extend this pattern to new interlocutors, and, to a lesser degree, to new word forms. Their performance is much worse if the cueing attribute is socially irrelevant, such as the spatial orientation of the
interlocutor (facing the screen or standing sideways). Participants learning a pattern cued by gender
outperform those learning a pattern cued by age both with previously seen and new items and with
previously seen and new interlocutors in the test phase.
These results are relevant in three ways. First, along with work like Docherty et al. (2013) they show
that detailed social language learning lasts well into adulthood. Second, while both gender and age
are crucial predictors in both the production and the perception of sociolinguistic variation (Labov,
2001), our results hint at the primacy of gender over age in social language learning. We assume that
this is because speakers can be typically reliably identified as males or females, delineating two robust
groups, while the adult–child distinction is a lot more gradient.
The potential link between the robustness of encountered variation and the ease with which a cue is
employed in social learning, along with the fact that unreliable cues (such as speaker spatial orientation) are discarded by our learners, hint at a third point of relevance. Exemplar-based models of
categorisation (Nosofsky, 1988) are often criticised for tolerating too much detail, with the potential
consequence that the categorisation space becomes too noisy for relevant generalisations to emerge
(Palmeri and Nosofsky, 1995; Gluck and Myers, 2001; Denton et al., 2008). Our results suggest that
learners only focus on socially relevant associations (like those between age/gender and the preference
of certain word forms) in sociolinguistic variation because these are robust enough to be relevant. To
put it differently, our work provides sociolinguistic support for the exemplar theory of categorisation,
an important result, since exemplar models are the only models out there that are, in turn, able to
support observed sociolinguistic variation in its entirety (Docherty and Foulkes, 2006).
Références
Denton, S. E., Kruschke, J. K., and Erickson, M. A. (2008). Rule-based extrapolation : A continuing
challenge for exemplar models. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15(4) :780–786.
Docherty, G. and Foulkes, P. (2006). The social life of phonetics and phonology. Journal of Phonetics,
34(4) :409–438.
Docherty, G. J., Langstrof, C., and Foulkes, P. (2013). Listener evaluation of sociophonetic variability :
Probing constraints and capabilities. Linguistics, 51(2) :355–380.
Gluck, M. A. and Myers, C. E. (2001). Gateway to memory : An introduction to neural network
modeling of the hippocampus and learning. MIT Press.
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change. Social factors, volume 2. Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1988). Similarity, frequency, and category representations. Journal of Experimental
Psychology : Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 14(1) :54.
Palmeri, T. J. and Nosofsky, R. M. (1995). Recognition memory for exceptions to the category rule.
Journal of Experimental Psychology : Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(3) :548.
50
The roles of peer and teacher variation in language acquisition in
two-way immersion primary school classrooms
1
Rebecca Starr1
National University of Singapore
is limited to the classroom speech of the teacher, restricting student acquisition of variation (Swain,
1985; Genesee, 1991, , a.o.). Supporters of the two-way immersion model, in which students who speak
different languages at home are placed in the same classroom and spend time learning in each language, argue that students benefit from exposure to both native-speaker classmate and teacher speech
(Lindholm-Leary, 2001). This scenario becomes more complex in cases where teachers and students
speak a range of dialects which may differ substantially from the variety presented in classroom materials. In a dialectally-diverse setting, students must learn to negotiate among the varieties used by
different classroom participants in their acquisition process. The present study gauges the influence of
teacher and classmate speech on student acquisition, and examines to what extent students acquire
the prescriptive standard targeted in the program when it is not consistently used by teachers or peers.
This study draws on data recorded from two classes of primary school students (ages 5-7) at a
Mandarin-English two-way immersion program in the United States. Each class was equally divided
between Mandarin- and English-dominant speakers. The two classes shared the same set of Mandarinspeaking teachers, all of whom were speakers of non-standard Mandarin varieties. Crucially, Class
2 contained a higher proportion of Mandarin-dominant students who spoke non-standard varieties,
thus providing an ideal setting in which to examine issues of teacher versus classmate influence on
acquisition.
Focusing on the stigmatized merger of retroflex and dental sibilant initials in Mandarin, an analysis
of the main teacher and two subject teachers indicates that all three used more standard variants in
‘curricular’ classroom contexts (i.e., reading and lecturing) than in ‘noncurricular’ classroom contexts
(i.e., organizing and scolding). This pattern of variation potentially allows students to target standard
pronunciations within their teachers’ speech, thereby acquiring a more standard variety.
Indeed, analysis of English-dominant students’ Mandarin use reveals that students produced the
standard dental-retroflex distinction almost exclusively, in all contexts. Comparing the two firstgrade classes reveals that students were significantly affected by patterns of classmate language use.
English-dominant students in Class 2, in which Mandarin-dominant classmates frequently used the
non-standard merger, produced significantly more of the merger than their counterparts in Class 1. In
both classrooms, however, English-dominant students used the standard dental-retroflex distinction
far more frequently than their Mandarin-dominant classmates.
These findings suggest that classmate language use plays a significant but limited role in students’
acquisition of linguistic variation. The evidence also indicates that students in early primary education
are sensitive to sociolinguistic information present in stylistic variation, to the extent that, even in the
absence of explicit correction, students can acquire a more standard variety than those of their peers
or teachers. In addition to its practical ramifications in the realm of language pedagogy, further work
on the role of variation in two-way immersion classrooms can provide more insight into how children
acquire and make use of sociolinguistic knowledge as they enter school settings.
Références
Genesee, F. (1991). Second language learning in school settings : lessons from immersion. In Reynolds, A. G., editor, Bilingualism, Multiculturalism, and Second Language Learning : The Mcgill
Conference in Honour of Wallace E. Lambert. Lawrence Erlbaum associates, London.
Lindholm-Leary, K. J. (2001). Dual language education, volume 28. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon,
UK.
Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence : Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehen51
sible output in its development. In Grass, S. and Madden, C., editors, Input in second language
acquisition, pages 165–179. Newbury House Publisher, Rowley.
52
How SES affects the development of vocabulary and grammar in
3-to-4-year-olds acquiring German as L1 and L2
Christine Czinglar1, Katherina Korecky-Kröll1, Kumru Uzunkaya-Sharma1, Wolfgang U. Dressler1
1
University of Vienna
International studies like PISA confirm the fact that not only immigrant children, acquiring German as
a second language (L2), but also children from families with low socio-economic status (SES), who acquire German as a first language (L1), score at lower levels on language competence tests (Schwantner
and Schreiner, 2010). Moreover studies show that early experience from birth to age six lays essential
foundations for success at school and that early delay cannot easily be made up for later on (Walker et
al. 1994 ; Nelson et al. 2011). Studies on monolingual L1-acquisition show that SES affects vocabulary
acquisition (Hart and Risley, 1995; Weizman and Snow, 2001; Weisleder and Fernald, 2013), and also
the rate of grammar acquisition (Gathercole and Hoff, 2007). The same holds for bilingual children
from immigrant families (Oller and Eilers, 2002).
In this talk, we present data on the grammatical development of 48 kindergarten children in Vienna,
whose language development is investigated in an ongoing research project (INPUT) using a mixedmethods approach. 24 of the children are monolingual (L1 German) and 24 bilingual (L1 Turkish, L2
German). The bilingual children speak mainly Turkish at home, their first systematic contact with
German starts with their entrance to child-care facilities (in our group with 3 years at the latest).
Both groups comprise children from high and low-SES backgrounds, where SES is operationalized by
the main caretaker’s highest education (Ensminger and Fothergill, 2003; Hoff, 2003) and occupational
prestige (Hart and Risley, 1995).
Information on SES and factors such as age of exposure, quantity of input, group size, literacy activities
etc. comes from interviews with parents and kindergarten teachers. The children’s passive vocabulary
is measured by a research version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test PPVT-IV (Dunn and Dunn,
2007) for German, administered twice, at the age of 3 and at 4 ;3. At the age of about 3 ;3 and 4 ;6
their grammatical development is measured by (parts of) the standardized test LiSe-DaZ (Schulz and
Tracy, 2011). LiSe-DaZ elicits different sentence types to measure verb placement, agreement and case
properties, and also the comprehension of wh-questions is tested.
The test data analyzed so far (1st data point) show significant SES-related differences regarding
vocabulary acquisition for the monolingual children, but not for the bilingual children. Length of exposure in kindergarten alone does not explain the differences in the bilingual children either. For the
comprehension of wh-questions there are significant SES-effects for both groups at 3 ;3 years. HighSES-children also show faster acquisition of verb placement in both groups, but the differences are not
yet significant at 3 ;3 years. Also there is a strong correlation between the passive vocabulary scores
and the grammatical development (comprehension of wh-questions for both groups, verb placement
only for the monolingual group). This suggests that SES indeed has an effect on the rate of grammatical development (possibly mediated via lexical knowledge), corroborating the results of Weinert and
Ebert (2013) for monolingual L1-German. This argues against nativist assumptions that the development of core grammar is not affected by environmental factors.
Références
Dunn, L. M. and Dunn, D. M. (2007). PPVT-4 : Peabody picture vocabulary test. Minneapolis,
Pearson.
Ensminger, M. E. and Fothergill, K. E. (2003). A decade of measuring ses : What it tells us and where
to go from here. In Bornstein, M. H. and Bradley, R. H., editors, Socioeconomic status, parenting,
and child development, pages 13–27. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwahˆe, New Jersey.
Gathercole, V. C. M. and Hoff, E. (2007). Input and the acquisition of language : Three questions.
In Hoff, E. and Shatz, r., editors, Blackwell Handbook of Language Development, pages 107–127.
Blackwell, Malden, MA.
53
Hart, B. and Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American
children. Paul H Brookes Publishing, Baltimore.
Hoff, E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence : Socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child development, 74(5) :1368–1378.
Oller, D. K. and Eilers, R. E. (2002). Language and literacy in bilingual children. Number 2. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon.
Schulz, P. and Tracy, R. (2011). LiSe-DaZ : Linguistische Sprachstandserhebung-Deutsch als Zweitsprache. Hogrefe, Göttingen.
Schwantner, U. and Schreiner, C., editors (2010). PISA 2009 : internationaler Vergleich von Schülerleistungen. Erste Ergebnisse Lesen, Mathematik, Naturwissenschaft. Leykam, Graz.
Weinert, S. and Ebert, S. (2013). Spracherwerb im vorschulalter. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 16(2) :303–332.
Weisleder, A. and Fernald, A. (2013). Talking to children matters early language experience strengthens processing and builds vocabulary. Psychological science, 24(11) :2143–2152.
Weizman, Z. O. and Snow, C. E. (2001). Lexical output as related to children’s vocabulary acquisition :
Effects of sophisticated exposure and support for meaning. Developmental psychology, 37(2) :265–
279.
54
Visiting Transatlantic Relatives : A Variationist Perspective on the
Acquisition of Syntactic Complexity
Stephen Levey1, Rebecca MacIntyre1, Emily Sullivan1
1
University of Ottawa
Inspired by the dearth of research on children’s production of relative clauses (Diessel and Tomasello,
2000), this study presents a quantitative analysis of variability in relative constructions in natural
speech data, focusing on 94 children aged between 7 and 12 recorded in Ottawa, Ontario and London,
U.K. A key component of the investigation in both locations is the systematic comparison of children’s
usage patterns with a commensurate adult control variety representing baseline community norms.
Drawing on the framework of comparative variationist sociolinguistics applied to large and representative compendia of vernacular speech (Poplack and Tagliamonte, 2001; Tagliamonte, 2013), the study
investigates : (i) the social and linguistic constraints on relative markers used by children to introduce restrictive relative clauses ; (ii) developmental changes associated with relative clause formation
strategies in later childhood ; (iii) the relationship between child and adult relative clause formation
strategies ; and (iv) the role of dialect-specific constraints on the acquisition process.
2000 relative constructions extracted from spontaneous child and adult discourse were coded for geographical location, age, sex, as well as an array of linguistic factors (type of relativizer, syntactic function
of the relativizer, matrix clause construction type, animacy and definiteness of the antecedent head
NP, and complexity of the filler-gap dependency). Distributional and multivariate analyses (Sankoff
et al., 2005) reveal that the acquisition of variable relative clause formation strategies extends well into
later childhood (Romaine, 1985), with rates of variant relativizer usage showing increasing alignment
with community-based norms as children mature. Cross-varietal comparison affords a window on the
dialect-specific conditioning of relative marker choice (e.g., use of relativizer what in London English
versus its absence in Ottawa English).
Detailed quantitative analysis of usage data highlights the disjuncture between analysts’ intuitions
about the relative clauses used by children and adults, and those constructions that these speakers actually produce. Especially salient in both the child and adult datasets is the preponderance of relative
constructions that are structurally biclausal, but semantically equivalent to monoclausal predications
(Fox and Thompson, 2007). Of particular significance is the finding that the elevated frequency in
child speech of specific types of relative construction assumed to be developmental in nature (e.g.,
relative clauses embedded in the predicate nominal of a copular clause ; Diessel, 2004) appear to be
motivated (at least in part) by equivalent constructions occurring at commensurate rates in naturally
occurring adult discourse.
The study highlights the utility of comparative variationist sociolinguistics in disentangling socially
and developmentally motivated patterns of variation, a perennial challenge in the investigation of
child language variation (Roberts, 2013). Furthermore, the results converge in demonstrating that the
(variable) syntax of relative constructions in child speech cannot be adequately characterized without
reference to the communitybased norms underpinning adult vernacular input, generating an important
finding relevant to both developmental sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics.
Références
Diessel, H. (2004). The Acquisition of Complex Sentences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Diessel, H. and Tomasello, M. (2000). The development of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech.
Cognitive Linguistics, 11(1/2) :131–152.
Fox, B. and Thompson, S. (2007). Relative clauses in english conversation : Relativizers, frequency,
and the notion of construction. Studies in Languages, 31(2) :293–326.
Poplack, S. and Tagliamonte, S. (2001). African American English in the diaspora. Wiley-Blackwell,
Oxford.
55
Roberts, J. (2013). Child language variation. In Chambers, J. K. and Schilling, N., editors, The
Handbook of Language Variation and Change, pages 263–276. Blackwell, Oxford.
Romaine, S. (1985). Syntactic variation and the acquisition of strategies of relativization in the
language of edinburgh schoolchildren. In Jacobsen, S., editor, Papers from the Third Scandinavian
Symposium on Syntactic Variation, pages 19–33. Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm.
Sankoff, D., Tagliamonte, S., and Smith, E. (2005). Goldvarb X : A variable rule application for
Macintosh and Windows. Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto.
Tagliamonte, S. (2013). Comparative sociolinguistics. In Chambers, J. and Schilling, N., editors,
Handbook of language variation and change, pages 128–156. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.
56
Thursday 4 December 2014
Poster Session
57
From Code-switching to Translating : a corpusbased approach of
bilingual repetitions
1
1
Frédérique Atangana
La Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
The blossoming of bilingual children’s conversations lies in their systematic recourse to language
alternations to convey interactional, discursive and social meaning. This performance, known as codeswitching, covers several verbal activities including repetitions (Auer, 1995). In a bilingual context,
these repetitions may or may not preserve the language of origin, involving therefore translated reformulations. This phenomenon, called “bilingual repetitions” (Gumperz, 1982), is at the core of the
present study, which explores the functions and competences such practises entail in bilingual children’s language acquisition.
Repetition and code-switching have each become major focuses of attention in studies on language
acquisition : the former being a selective and progressive process used to internalize and hypothesize
on language structure (Bloom et al., 1974) and the latter evidencing early language differentiation
(Paradis and Genesee, 1996). However, the simultaneous study of the two processes through bilingual
repetitions, has led researchers to treat the first as being merely a function of the second, serving
clarification or emphasis purposes (Myers-Scotton, 1993).
To further investigate this issue, drawing on the notion that natural environments offer rich insights
into children’s linguistic patterns, we video recorded natural conversations of seven French-English
bilingual children (aged between 2 ;3 and 7 ;02). The conversations were transcribed using the CHAT
transcription system (McWhinney & Snow, 1990). Detailed turnby- turn analyses enabled us to code,
with EXCEL, each instance of bilingual repetitions according to four criteria : (1) involved self or
other-repetitions (2) with or without volition (3) performed in French or English, and (4) referring to
the same entity by means of either equivalence, expansion or contraction.
Results show that the rate of bilingual repetitions varied from one bilingual child to the other according
to parent’s discourse strategies. However, the common feature was that bilingual repetitions were all
almost exclusively spontaneous reformulations in French (children’s strongest language) of what their
interlocutor had previously uttered in English. Rather than solely evidencing incompetence in English,
we demonstrated that bilingual repetitions were multifunctional since they enabled the children to (1)
overtly ratify the meaning of new words in English, (2) reach communicative goals by constructing a
coherent discourse in two linguistic systems (3) actively participate in the expression of meaning across
languages and (4) reflect upon and manipulate the formal aspects of their two languages, evidencing
therefore metalinguistic skills in the lexical and structural domains.
We therefore concluded that these bilingual children had a natural ability to translate, a skilled performance that they employ at this stage of their acquisition to fully embrace and experience their
bilingualism.
Références
Angermeyer, P. S. (2002). Lexical cohesion in multilingual conversation. International journal of
Bilingualism, 6(4) :361–393.
Auer, P. (1995). The pragmatics of code-switching : A sequential approach. In Milroy, L. and Muysken,
P., editors, One Speaker, Two Languages : Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching, pages
115–135. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Auer, P. (1999). Code-switching in Conversation : Language, Interaction and Identity. Routledge,
London.
Bloom, L., Lightbown, P., and Hood, L. (1974). Imitation in language development : If, when, and
why. Cognitive Psychology, 6(3) :380–420.
58
Clark, E. V. (2007). Young children’s uptake of new words in conversation. Language in Society,
36(02) :157–182.
Clark, R. (1974). Performing without competence. Journal of Child Language, 1(01) :1–10.
Finch, S. B. (2009). Repetition as linguistic and social strategy in Hindi-English bilingual discourse.
PhD dissertation, University of Texas, Austin.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies, volume 1. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Harris, B. (1975). The importance of natural translations. Working Papers in Bilingualism, 12 :96–114.
Lanza, E. (1997/2004). Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism : A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Oxford
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project : Tools for Analyzing Talk, volume 1. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah (NJ).
Malakoff, M. E. (1992). Translation ability : A natural bilingual and metalinguistic skill. Advances in
psychology, 83 :515–529.
Myers-Scotton, C. (1993). Social motivations for codeswitching : Evidence from Africa. Oxfodr University Press, Oxford.
Paradis, J. and Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children. Studies in second
language acquisition, 18 :1–25.
59
Belong(ing) : The effects of migration and attitude on the
acquisition of Northern Irish English
Jennifer Thorburn1, Karen P. Corrigan1, Nicholas S. Roberts1
1
Newcastle University
The acquisition of local variants by migrants in England, Scotland, and the Republic of Ireland is a
growing area of study (e ;g ; Verma et al., 1992; Schleef et al., 2011; Drummond, 2012; Migge, 2012;
Nestor et al., 2012). This can be at least partially attributed to the unparalleled in-migration these
regions have experienced in the past decade, primarily due to the expansion of the European Union in
May 2004, when Malta, Cyprus, and the “A8” countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,
Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia) joined. While many member countries closed their labour
markets to A8 nationals, citizens of A8 countries are allowed to work in the United Kingdom, Ireland,
and Sweden with virtually no restrictions, resulting in a large number of migrants and a shift in the
linguistic and cultural landscapes of these nations.
In this paper, we explore notions of migration, dialect/language acquisition, and transfer in Northern
Ireland in the speech of teens attending two Catholic schools in Armagh, a small city 40 miles southwest of Belfast, focussing on the use of the “staple” (Hazen 2006 :581) sociolinguistic variable (ing).
Specifically, we address the following research questions :
1. What factors constrain locally-born teenagers’ use of (ing) ?
2. To what extent do non-native speakers of English acquire these local patterns ?
As the “most uniform of all variables of English” (Labov, 2001, :86), (ing) provides an excellent baseline for the community. Moreover, it has been examined in the speech of migrant Polish (Schleef
et al., 2011; Drummond, 2012) and Pakistani (Verma et al., 1992) populations in the United Kingdom,
as well as other studies of second language acquisition in migrant populations (Adamson and Regan,
1991; Major, 2004; Jia and Fuse, 2007, e.g.). Previous studies focused on child and adolescent migrants
(Verma et al., 1992; Schleef et al., 2011, e.g.) demonstrate that the speech of these young migrants
can pattern differently from that of their native peers, even in the face of intense contact between the
two groups.
Interviewed between 2012 and 2014, the Armagh sample is stratified according to sex (male, female)
and first language (Northern Irish English, Polish) so that the present study can be compared directly
to Schleef et al.’s (2011) research on the use of (ing) by adolescent Polish migrants in Edinburgh and
London, as well as Drummond’s (2012) work with adult Poles in Manchester. We consider traditionally significant factors (e.g. Labov, 2001) such as grammatical conditioning, speech style, and sex
as well as factors specifically targeting the migrant sub-sample, following Schleef et al., 2011. The
present study also considers the speech of native Lithuanians, expanding the conversation to other
migrant populations. Preliminary multivariate analyses indicate that traditionally significant factors
such as grammatical conditioning as well as others - including attitudinal disposition - are implicated,
sometimes in unexpected ways, in keeping with Schleef et al.’s (2011) findings. This study highlights
the complex nature of the target variable and, more generally, of the dialect acquisition all migrants
face in their new communities.
Références
Adamson, H. D. and Regan, V. M. (1991). The acquisition of community speech norms by asian
immigrants learning english as a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13 :1–
22.
Drummond, R. (2012). Aspects of identity in a second language : ING variation in the speech of Polish
migrants living in Manchester, UK. Language Variation and Change, 24 :107 – 133.
60
Jia, G. and Fuse, A. (2007). Acquisition of english grammatical morphology by native mandarinspeaking children and adolescents : Age-related differences. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(5) :1280–1299.
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change. Social factors, volume 2. Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Major, R. C. (2004). Gender and stylistic variation in second language phonology. Language Variation
and Change, 16(03) :169–188.
Migge, B. (2012). Irish english and recent immigrants to ireland. In Migge, B. and Ní Chiosáin, M.,
editors, New Perspectives on Irish English, pages 311–326. John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam/Phladelphia.
Nestor, N., Chasaide, C. N., and Regan, V. (2012). Discourse ‘like’and social identity : A case study
of poles in ireland. In Migge, B. and Chasaide, C. N., editors, New Perspectives on Irish English,
pages 327–354. John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Schleef, E., Meyerhoff, M., and Clark, L. (2011). Teenagers’ acquisition of variation : A comparison
of locally-born and migrant teens’ realisation of English (ing) in Edinburgh and London. English
World-Wide, 32 :206 – 236.
Verma, M. K., Firth, S., and Corrigan, K. (1992). The developing phonological system of panjabi/urdu
speaking children learning english as a second language in britain. In Leather, J. and James, A.,
editors, New Sounds 92 : Proceedings of the 1992 Amsterdam Symposium on the Acquisition of
Second-language Speech (University of Amsterdam, 13-16 april 1992), pages 174–199. University of
Amsterdam, Amsterdam.
61
Acquisition et variation diastratique dans l’expression des émotions
chez l’enfant italien et roumain
1
Letizia Volpin1, Anna Ghimenton1
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3
Cette recherche porte sur les représentations mentales sous-tendant les expressions des émotions d’enfants issus de différentes origines socioculturelles. Ces expressions ont des universaux communs à
toutes les langues et cultures (Wierzbicka, 1999), cependant leur extériorisation diverge en fonction
de l’appartenance culturelle et sociale de l’individu (Anolli et al., 2008).
Le but de ce travail est d’examiner la façon dont l’expression des émotions varie selon la dimension
diastratique (milieu social et origine culturelle) chez des enfants d’origine italienne et étrangère, installés dans la province de Padoue.
Méthodologie :
L’échantillon (n=28) est constitué de quatre groupes d’enfants de sexe masculin, âgés entre 5 et 6
ans :
(13)
Sept enfants italiens issus d’un milieu social plutôt favorisé ;
(14)
Sept enfants italiens issus d’un milieu social moins favorisé ;
(15)
Sept enfants d’origine roumaine issus d’un milieu social moins favorisé et nés en Italie ;
(16)
Sept enfants d’origine roumaine issus d’un milieu social moins favorisé arrivés en Italie après
leur naissance.
A l’instar du protocole de Fonagy and Bérard (1972), nous avons demandé aux enfants de produire
la phrase sono le otto (fr. ‘il est huit heures’). Lors de la production de cette phrase, l’enfant devait
se projeter dans une situation de production exprimant la joie, la colère, la peur, la tristesse ainsi que
dans une situation de production neutre. Après les enregistrements de ces cinq situations imaginées,
nous avons demandé à l’enfant de raconter une expérience effrayante et une expérience très joyeuse
afin de pouvoir analyser l’expression de ses émotions dans un contexte de production tendanciellement
spontanée.
Analyses :
Pour chaque production acoustique (logiciels Audacity et Praat), nous avons mesuré la fréquence fondamentale, la durée, l’intensité et les formants (F1, F2, F3, F4). Nous avons procédé à la comparaison
systématique des productions obtenues dans chaque groupe qui nous permettra de mieux comprendre
la variation des expressions selon le milieu social d’origine (comparaisons des productions des groupes
1 et 2), selon l’appartenance socioculturelle (comparaisons des productions des groupes 2 et 3) mais
aussi selon l’exposition au contact linguistique et l’expérience langagière de l’enfant en situation de
migration (comparaisons des productions des groupes 2, 3 et 4).
Références
Anolli, L., Wang, L., Mantovani, F., and De Toni, A. (2008). The voice of emotion in chinese and
italian young adults. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 39(5) :565–598.
Fonagy, I. and Bérard, E. (1972). “il est huit heures“ : contribution à l’analyse sémantique de la vive
voix. Phonetica, 26(3) :157–192.
Wierzbicka, A. (1999). Emotions across languages and cultures : Diversity and universals. Cambridge
University Press, UK.
62
Incremental acquisition of morphosyntactic variation :
Evidence from children’s Spanish subject pronoun expression
1
Naomi Shin1
University of New Mexico
Some patterns of structured variation emerge in early childhood (e.g. Miller, 2013; Roberts, 1997;
Smith et al., 2013), while others are acquired later (e.g. Guy and Boyd, 1990; Smith et al., 2009).
Is differential timing of acquisition of variation influenced by frequency in the input (Nardy et al.,
2013, :273) and/or by complexity of the patterns themselves (Smith et al., 2013, :319) ? Studying the
timing of acquisition should shed light on how children learn patterns of structured variation. One
possibility is that children engage in probability matching, tracking the likelihood that a form will
occur and matching that likelihood in one’s output (Wonnacott, 2011). If so, then the strength of
patterns in the input may determine their order of emergence during development.
The current study addresses the question of whether patterns of structured morphosyntactic variation
emerge in a predictable order by examining Spanish-speaking children’s overt versus null subject pronoun expression (e.g. yo bailo bailo ‘I dance’). While rates of pronoun expression vary across varieties
of adult Spanish, patterns of use are strikingly consistent, reflecting an adult grammar that is both systematic and probabilistic (Carvalho et al., ming). To investigate children’s acquisition of this variable
grammar, sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with 154 monolingual children in Mexico, ages 6
to 16. Finite verbs occurring with an overt or null subject pronoun in contexts where either choice is
possible (i.e. ‘variable contexts’) were extracted from the interviews, yielding 5,925 verb tokens. The
children were divided into four age groups, 6/7, 8/9, 10/11, and 12+. Logistic regressions (one for each
age group) were performed in SPSS and included five factors that have routinely been shown to probabilistically constrain adults’ pronoun use : Grammatical person/number, Priming, Switchreference,
TMA, and Clause type. Adults are likelier to express subject pronouns when 1) the referent is singular,
2) when the previous mention of the referent is a subject pronoun, 3) when switching reference, 4)
with verbs conjugated in the imperfect rather than other TMA forms, and 5) in main rather than
coordinate clauses. Furthermore, the first three – Person/Number, Priming and Switch-Reference –
are the most robust predictors of adult pronoun use (Carvalho et al., ming; Otheguy and Zentella,
2012).
The results in Table 1 show that the oldest children’s pronoun expression was constrained by the
following factors ranked in order of strongest to weakest :
1. Person/Number, Priming, Switch-Reference, TMA, Clause.
The results also indicate that the strongest predictors of pronoun expression among older children and
adults emerge earliest during childhood.
1. 6/7-year-olds : Person/Number, Priming, Switch-reference
2. 8/9-year-olds : Person/Number, Priming, Switch-Reference, TMA
Furthermore, the direction of effects for significant predictors was consistent across age groups. Thus,
at an early age children attune to robust statistical tendencies ; later they become sensitive to weaker
patterns. The study suggests that children make use of statistical tendencies in the input to formulate
probabilistic patterns in their language production, a finding that is compatible with the idea that
frequency in the input is a primary force driving the acquisition of structured variation (Nardy et al.,
2013, :273).
Références
Carvalho, A. M., Orozco, R., and Shin, N. L. (Forthcoming). Spanish Subject Pronoun Expression in
Spanish : A Cross-Dialectical Perspective. Georgetown University Press.
63
Guy, G. R. and Boyd, S. (1990). The development of a morphological class. Language Variation and
Change, 2(01) :1–18.
Miller, K. (2013). Acquisition of variable rules :/s/-lenition in the speech of chilean spanish-speaking
children and their caregivers. Language Variation and Change, 25(03) :311–340.
Nardy, A., Chevrot, J.-P., and Barbu, S. (2013). The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation : Looking
back and thinking ahead. Linguistics, 51(2) :255 – 284.
Otheguy, R. and Zentella, A. C. (2012). Spanish in New York : Language contact, dialectal leveling,
and structural continuity. Oxford University Press.
Roberts, J. (1997). Acquisition of variable rules : a study of (-t, d) deletion in preschool children.
Journal of Child Language, 24 :351–372.
Smith, J., Durham, M., and Fortune, L. (2009). Universal and dialect-specific pathways of acquisition :
Caregivers, children, and t/d deletion. Language Variation and Change, 21(01) :69–95.
Smith, J., Durham, M., and Richards, H. (2013). The social and linguistic in the acquisition of
sociolinguistic norms : Caregivers, children and variation. Linguistics, 51(2) :285 – 324.
Wonnacott, E. (2011). Balancing generalization and lexical conservatism : An artificial language study
with child learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 65(1) :1–14.
Table 1. Binary logistic regressions, five predictors of Mexican children’s subject pronoun expression,
ages 6/7, 8/9, 10/11, 12+
Variables
Variables
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Wald
p
6/7
(N Vbs = 1524), R2 = .16
Person/Number
31.03 <.0001
Switch-Reference 23.28 <.0001
Priming
22.04 <.0001
[TMA]
6.62
.09
[Clause]
5.84
.05
10/11
(N Vbs =1278), R2 = .22
Person/Number
45.18 <.0001
TMA
23.06 <.0001
Priming
17.69 <.0001
Clause
10.88
.004
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
64
Wald
p
8/9
(N Vbs =1578), R2 = .17
Person/Number
53.68 <.0001
Priming
15.99 <.0001
TMA
12.28
.006
Switch-Reference
5.28
.02
[Clause]
2.86
.24
12+
(N Vbs =1545), R2 = .19
Person/Number
34.09 <.0001
Priming
33.79 <.0001
TMA
13.82
.003
Clause
12.87
.002
Input parental et acquisition de schémas d’alternance phonologique
Loïc Liégois1, Damien Chabanal
Laboratoire de Recherche sur le Langage
1
Nos recherches concernent l’acquisition de patterns phonologiques par des enfants francophones âgés
de 28 mois à 64 mois. Nous traitons notamment de l’influence de l’input sur l’acquisition de deux
variables sociolinguistiques : l’élision du schwa et la liaison.
Pour expliquer l’acquisition de la variation phonologique, nous suivons le cadre proposé par les modèles basés sur l’usage et les grammaires de constructions (Barlow et Kemmer, 2000 ; Bybee, 2001 ;
Goldberg, 2006). Dans ce courant, l’acquisition du langage n’est pas gouvernée par une mémorisation de structures sous la forme d’un conditionnement de stimuliréponses ni par un travail inductif
dicté par une grammaire universelle. L’acquisition du langage reposerait plutôt sur les évènements
d’usage auxquels l’enfant est exposé et à partir desquels il est en mesure, grâce à la mobilisation de
compétences sociocognitives générales telles que la mémoire ou l’analogie, de dégager des régularités
et des patterns de variation (Tomasello, 2003). Pour mesurer l’influence de l’input sur l’émergence de
schémas de variation chez l’enfant, nous avons recueilli trois corpus denses (XXX, 2014) dans le cadre
du projet XXX. Il s’agit de corpus oraux recueillis sur deux temps, en situation naturelle d’interaction entre trois enfants et leurs parents respectifs (environ dix heures d’enregistrement par famille).
Les sujets de cette étude (deux fillettes et un garçon) sont âgés de 28 à 64 mois et premiers nés au
sein de familles biparentales monolingues. Parmi les annotations, l’adresse du discours tient une place
prépondérante : nous notons, pour chaque énoncé, s’il appartient au discours adressé à l’enfant (DAE)
ou au discours adressé à l’adulte (DAA). À partir de ces données, nous souhaitons :
(17)
Décrire la variabilité de l’input parental. Il paraît important de montrer dans un premier
temps à quelle variation l’enfant est exposé dans des interactions naturelles au domicile familial.
Dans cet objectif, nous répondrons à ces questions : à quelle fréquence l’enfant est-il exposé à
des phénomènes de variation phonologique ? Les pères et les mères de nos sujets se comportentils de la même façon ? Au niveau de la liaison et de l’élision du schwa, l’enfant est-il exposé
à autant, voire davantage de variation que l’adulte, comme la littérature le relève pour des
variables phonologiques de l’anglais (Dilley et al., 2013 ; Foulkes et al., 2005) ? Les parents
ajustent-ils leurs productions en fonction du développement linguistique de leur enfant entre
chaque temps de recueil de données ?
(18)
Observer l’acquisition de la variation phonologique par les enfants. Nous observerons
notamment si l’acquisition de la variation phonologique est guidée lexicalement par l’input. Nos
données laissent en effet apparaître des différences d’usage de la variable schwa en fonction de
la construction dans laquelle il apparaît : chez l’enfant, son usage se rapproche plus vite de
celui de l’adulte dans les constructions verbales (tu le prends, il a envie de boire) que dans les
constructions nominales (c’est le prix, il a envie de bonbons). Nos analyses montrent que ces
trajectoires différentes sont influencées par les particularités relevées en DAE.
Références
Barlow, M. and Kemmer, S., editors (2000). Usage Based Models of Language. CSLI Publications,
Sanford, Californie.
Bybee, J. (2001). Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Dilley, L. C., Millett, A. L., McAuley, J. D., and Bergeson, T. R. (2013). Phonetic variation in
consonants in infant-directed and adult-directed speech : the case of regressive place assimilation in
word-final alveolar stops. Journal of Child Language, 41(1) :155–175.
Foulkes, P., Docherty, G. J., and Watt, D. (2005). Phonological variation in child-directed speech.
Language, 81(1) :177 – 206.
65
Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at Work : The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language : A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge. Massachussetts. England.
66
Impact d’une Langue Seconde sur l’usage de la Langue Première en
contexte d’immigration : changements cognitifs et sociolinguistiques
Tatania Aleksandrova1
1
Université Paris 8
Le processus d’acquisition d’une langue seconde (L2) a fait l’objet de nombreuses études en psychoet sociolinguistique. En revanche, relativement peu de recherches s’intéressent aux changements en
langue première (L1) de bilingues en contexte d’immigration. Cette étude a pour objectif de décrire
quelques changements linguistiques en L1 des bilingues tardifs russes/français et de montrer que ces
changements dus à l’influence du français à plusieurs niveaux linguistiques : morphologique, lexical et
syntaxique, ont un impact sur le comportement sociolinguistique et la conceptualisation de l’information par les bilingues lors de la production du discours en langue maternelle.
Le français et le russe, langue romane et langue slave respectivement, présentent de nombreux contrastes
linguistiques. En français, les déterminants obligatoires marquent le statut d’un référent dans le discours. En revanche, en russe la catégorie grammaticale de déterminants obligatoires est absente. Le
statut de l’information est généralement marqué par l’ordre des mots. Les différences typologiques
concernent également l’organisation temporo-aspectuelle des deux langues. Le français, s’appuie principalement sur les distinctions temporelles, alors qu’en russe l’opposition aspectuelle imperfectif/perfectif
est à la base de l’expression de cette organisation.
Les bilingues tardifs au nombre de 15 ont été soumis à la tache du récit de film. Leurs productions ont
été comparées à celles des locuteurs russophones et francophones monolingues. Les analyses ont été
effectuées selon le modèle d’analyse de discours la « quaestio » proposé par Klein et von Stutterheim
Klein and Von Stutterheim (1991) permettant de considérer les unités linguistiques dans le contexte
discursif. Deux domaines informationnels seront particulièrement intéressants pour la présente étude :
le domaine des entités et celui des procès.
Lors de l’introduction des entités dans le discours en L1, contrairement aux russophones monolingues,
les bilingues ont tendance à accompagner le SN d’un déterminant facultatif même lorsque ce dernier
se trouve en fin dénoncé. Cette tendance est considérée comme l’influence du français, car chez les
francophones les déterminants accompagnent le SN dans 100% des cas (figure 1). Ainsi, les bilingues
tendent à marquer le statut de l’information non seulement par l’ordre des mots, mais également par
les moyens locaux comme les pronoms démonstratifs, possessifs ou indéfinis. Dans le cas de l’emploi
des pronoms possessifs, les bilingues tendent à marquer l’appartenance d’un objet, ce qui n’est pas
caractéristique des russophones monolingues. Les études précédentes ont montré que le concept de la
« propriété privée » a un statut très particulier pour des locuteurs russophones. Suite au contexte
historique, pendant de nombreuses années ce concept n’existait pas dans les pays du bloc communiste
Pavlenko (2003). Ainsi, on peut considérer que cette influence linguistique de la L2 reflète un changement conceptuel dans les productions des bilingues dû au contexte sociolinguistique dans lequel ils
vivent.
Les changements linguistiques attestés dans le domaine des procès signalent également des changements conceptuels dans le discours des bilingues qui peuvent être signe des changements linguistiques
en russe au cours du temps. Les bilingues tendent à omettre les préfixes verbaux, ce qui conduit à la
simplification morphologique et sémantique de leurs discours.
Références
Klein, W. and Von Stutterheim, C. (1991). Text structure and referential movement. Sprache und
Pragmatik, 22 :1 – 32.
Pavlenko, A. (2003). ’I feel Clumsy Speaking Russian’ : L2 Influence on L1 in Narratives of Russian
L2 Users of English. In Cook, V., editor, Effects of the Second Language on the First, pages 32 –
62. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon.
67
Figure 1 : Emploi d’un déterminant facultatif pour l’introduction d’un nouveau référent par les bilingues tardifs, les francophones et les russophones monolingues
68
Friday 5 December 2014
Oral Session
69
“Sellouts” and “Wannabes” : Ownership, authenticity and the
difficulty of acquiring another dialect
1
Jeff Siegel1
University of New England (Australia)
Millions of people throughout the world begin acquiring another dialect of their own language – for
example, the regional dialect of their new home or the standard dialect of formal education. But a
meta-analysis of research on learning a second or additional dialect shows that very few are successful.
In fact, many would conclude that second dialect acquisition (SDA) is more difficult than second
language acquisition (SLA). This talk discusses some of the reasons for this special difficulty.
The most obvious explanations are linguistic – a consequence of the similarity of the second dialect
(D2) to the first dialect (D1). It is well known that in SLA negative transfer occurs more readily
between typologically similar language varieties and that it is difficult for learners to keep such varieties
separate. Also significant is the fact that SDA concerns mainly phonological acquisition, and according
to various theories of SLA, phonetic closeness between corresponding phonemes in two varieties leads
to difficulty in acquisition because learners are unable to perceive the differences. Biological factors
also come in here – the sensitive period for native-like phonological acquisition is only up to seven
years of age, and after then, it is very unlikely.
In the specific case of SDA, however, sociolinguistic explanations may be even more significant. These
are concerned with the close relationship between a dialect and social identity, and the attitudes of
both D2 learners towards the dialect and of the D2- speaking community towards dialect learners. The
main part of this talk concerns these factors, focusing on widespread views of ownership, authenticity
and the “true self” with regard to dialect. It shows how these views make it difficult for learners to
change their dialect, and also influence speakers of a dialect to react negatively to learners’ attempts
at speaking it. The talk concludes by presenting some of the implications these sociolinguistic factors
have for learning the standard dialect in the classroom.
70
“You should have stayed longer” : The role of immersion in the
acquisition of the modalized conditional expressing counterfactuality
1
Isabel Repiso1
Laboratoire Parole et Langage
The combination of a conditional tense and a modal verb –e.g., Elle aurait pu choisir son plat ellemême ; She could have chosen her dish herself - has been described as a frequent marker of counterfactuality in French Fauconnier (1984); Repiso (ming). However, the acquisition of this grammatical
device in counterfactual contexts remains relatively unexplored. The study analyzes the construction
of counterfactual scenarios in spoken French by 30 Spanish learners. Participants were presented with
a story that led to a negative outcome and were asked to provide alternative scenarios that prevented
such an outcome to happen (mutation task). The same method was replicated with a native-French
control group. Our results pointed out a shift in the grammatical devices related to the learner’s
immersion. Consider the following sentences :
1. Karen ne a pas morte parce qu’elle ne a mangé pas la sauce à base de vin de les moules, parce
que finalement elle a mangé poulet
Karen did not die because she did not eaten the Moules’ wine sauce, because she ate chicken
instead
2. Elle aurait pu ne pas recevoir sa promotion
She could have not being promoted
The frequency of use of coordinated clauses carrying verbal forms from the present and the passé
composé (1) was significantly higher in the learners having lived in France for a period less than
two years and height months on average (p = 0.0004 resulting from the Welch t-test analysis). The
frequency of use of the conditional tense and a modal verb (2) was significantly higher in the learners
presenting an immersion from six years onwards (p = 0.0002). Qualitative analyses on the learners’
texts showed that the grammars of the group using the present and the passé composé were generally
developed enough to produce conditional forms when attributing mental states. The positive effect of
immersion in the acquisition of the modalized conditional seems to be related to (i) the frequency of
this grammatical device in the naturalistic input, and to (ii) the opportunity to frame the learners’
oral production in the semantic domain of irreality.
Références
Fauconnier, G. (1984). Espaces mentaux : Aspects de la construction du sens dans les langues naturelles. Minuit, Paris.
Repiso, I. (forthcoming). La production des scenarios contrefactuels par des apprenants adultes hispanophones : Quelques effets d’étrangeté liés à l’emploi du conditionnel en français langue étrangère.
Language, Interaction, Acquisition.
71
The role of gestures in bilingual children’s language socialization
Aliyah Morgenstern1, Frédérique Atangana1, Sandra Benazzo2
1
Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, 2Université Lille 3
Interactions with their care-givers provide bilingual children with the symbolic resources that are necessary to construct their language productions and to determine which language they should use,
where, in what circumstances and with whom (Schieffelin, 2007, : 15). But in an environment where
two voices meet, overlap and intermingle, it is not always simple for children to carve out their own
place and to find the right words. The necessity to enter two languages and cultures at once might
have an influence on the management of the visual-gestural and the auditory modalities. Exposure
to two different languages often leads to the development of a strong and a weak language and to
the production of code-mixed utterances. Gestures might represent more stable forms - often shared
cross-culturally and accessible to all interlocutors - than words that vary in two codes for the same
function. The synchronization of gestures and verbal production, the number of gestures used and the
length of the “pre-linguistic” period in a bilingual child’s productions might thus be different from
same-age monolingual children. The study of simultaneous bilingual language acquisition allows the
researcher to investigate whether asymmetries in the linguistic development of two different languages
have an impact on the quantity and functions of gesture production.
In order to analyze bilingual children’s early use of symbolic gestures and their ability to produce deictic, representational and regulatory co-verbal gestures as their multimodal skills blossom, we collected
bilingual data in 6 families with children between 1 ;6 and 7 years old. The children were filmed one
hour a month during family interactions.
In the present study, we analyzed : 1) verbal and gestural negations produced by the children at
the beginning of the data ; 2) representational gestures when the children interacted in their weak
language and in their strong language. Our results indicate that bilingual children resort to gestures
of negation for at least six months longer than their monolingual counterparts (Guidetti, 2005). We
also show that representational and regulatory gestures have an important role in bilingual children’s
management of communication in multiparty interactions with interlocutors who speak different languages. Detailed contextual analyses of their gestural productions indicate that gestures pave the way
for bilingual children’s access to meaning when they are confronted with forms in two languages. The
gestures produced in multimodal interactions with expert adults speaking two languages play both a
compensatory (Nicoladis, 2007) and a scaffolding role as they become skilled bilingual speakers, and
reinforce their language socialization (Ochs and Schieffelin, 2001) into their bicultural community. The
bilingual children in our dataset thus create transitory transitional systems. In their search for the best
way to package their message, they use both shared gestures and code mixing, which are efficient and
enriching elements of their communicative repertoire during an important period of their multimodal
and bilingual language development.
Références
Guidetti, M. (2005). Yes or no ? how young french children combine gestures and speech to agree and
refuse. Journal of Child Language, 32(04) :911–924.
Nicoladis, E. (2007). The effect of bilingualism on the use of manual gestures. Applied Psycholinguistics,
28 :441–454.
Ochs, E. and Schieffelin, B. (2001). Language acquisition and socialization : Three developmental
stories and their implications. In Shweder, R. and Levine, R., editors, Culture Theory, pages 276–
320. Cambridge University Press Cambridge, New York, Cambridge.
Schieffelin, B. B. (2007). Langue et lieu dans l’univers de l’enfance. Anthropologie et sociétés, 31(1) :15–
37.
72
Agency, Identity and L2 variation
Professor Vera Regan1
University College Dublin
1
Research has shown that L2/multilingual speakers very often show similar constraint ordering to that
of L1 speakers. However rates of use of variants can very considerably. This paper explores this discrepancy using both quantitative and qualitative evidence.
The focus of the paper is on the Polish Diaspora living in France and in Ireland. It reports on studies
of language acquisition and use using a mixed methods approach. Detailed quantitative analyses were
carried out in relation to Polish speakers of both French and Irish English. Variables investigated both
quantitatively and qualitatively were longstanding stable ne in French, and incoming use of discourse
‘like’ and the strut vowel in Irish English.
Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with the Polish speakers in France, (Paris and a northern
town) and in Ireland (Dublin and a West of Ireland county). These data supported with survey data
were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively.
Quantitative results revealed that the general variation patterns, such as constraint ordering, of the
Polish L2 speakers were similar to those of native speakers of French and Irish English. As with all
L2 speakers, there is considerable individual variation. This has been explained in many ways in the
literature of Second Language Acquisition research. Our quantitative analysis was followed by qualitative analysis. This investigation of the life stories of Polish migrants in both countries, their stances
and orientations towards the country in which they are living, implied agency. Individuals seemed to
be exercising choice as to rates of use of variants in all cases. The reasons for the choices made varied
according to country and individual ; agency seemed to have played a role in their choice of variants.
This paper explores the implication that whereas the acquisition of constraint ordering seems to be
more or less automatic, given access to input through contact with native speakers, rates of variant
use may be influenced by choice on the part of the speaker according to attitudes, stances, future life
plans and general identity construction.
73
The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation during a study abroad : a
longitudinal analysis of learners’ personal networks
Rozenn Gautier1, Jean-Pierre Chevrot1
1
Université Grenoble Lidilem
Previous studies dealing with sociolinguistic variation in second language acquisition have mostly focused on the consequences of learning contexts on the learner’s use of sociolinguistic variants. Most
of the works include a comparative dimension concerning the impact of naturalistic exposure, for
example study abroad (SA) in comparison with classroom exposure (Howard et al., 2013). Different
studies agreed on the fact that learners in a naturalistic context developed an extensive sociolinguistic repertoire (Regan et al., 2009). A question that remains unanswered is : what are the causes of
changes in the interlanguage of learners ? One possible answer may be given by exploring in details
the social environment of learners during a SA. Indeed the social context may reveal a complex and
rich dynamic that could explain the changes during L2 acquisition. Thus, our goal is to describe the
social life of the learners through the concept of social network defined by sociology (Granovetter,
1983; Degenne and Forsé, 2004) and applied to sociolinguistics (Milroy, 1987; Milroy and Gordon,
2003). More precisely, we investigate learners’ personalnetworks ; thistype of approach implies to look
at each learner’s network and analyze who he or she is connected to and with what consequences.
Personal networks analysis of immigrants has already provided an interesting picture of their process
of adaptation to and integration to the host society (Lubbers et al., 2010).
We obtained encouraging results in a preliminary longitudinal study on seven American learners of
French in a SA context in France. The analysis of their oral productions suggests that learners who
developed composite personal network with native speakers decreased their use of formal variants
during SA and approached more closely the non-formal variant’s rate of everyday speech in France.
We take a second step forward with a larger study including 17 learners from China and the UnitedStates. By the mean of semi-directed interviews of an hour, we recorded them at three times of their
SA (9 months) in order to examine their usage of well-known French sociolinguistic variables (optional
French liaison and ne deletion). At those same periods we gathered data on their personal networks
thank to diaries that the learners have to fill out for a week (time of exposure to L2, type and density
of the relationships). We completed those social data by qualitative questions to understand the dynamic of changes in their personal networks. Linguistic and social data are therefore analyzed to catch
the dynamic interactions between change in the sociolinguistic usage and the process of socialization
during a SA.
Références
Degenne, A. and Forsé, M. (2004). Les réseaux sociaux. Armand Colin, Paris.
Granovetter, M. (1983). The strength of weak ties : A network theory revisited. Sociological theory,
1(1) :201–233.
Howard, M., Mougeon, R., and Dewaele, J.-M. (2013). Sociolinguistics and second language acquisition.
Oxford University Press, New York.
Lubbers, M. J., Molina, J. L., Lerner, J., Brandes, U., Ávila, J., and McCarty, C. (2010). Longitudinal
analysis of personal networks. the case of argentinean migrants in spain. Social Networks, 32(1) :91–
104.
Milroy, L. (1987). Language and social networks. Blackwell Oxford.
Milroy, L. and Gordon, M. (2003). Sociolinguistics : Method and interpretation, volume 13. Blackwell,
Oxford.
74
Regan, V., Howard, M., and Lemée, I. (2009). The acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in a study
abroad context. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon.
Personal network figures [examples]
Figure 1 : Social network composed of French and English speakers
Figure 2 : Social network composed of English speakers
75
The perception of sociophonetic variation by L1 and L2 speakers of
Spanish
1
Meg Cychosz1
Indiana University
Many studies have demonstrated the positive correlation present between sociolinguistic competence
and contact with native speakers in study abroad environments (Lapkin et al., 1995; Regan, 1995;
Schmidt, 2009; Linford et al., 2013). However, scholars have noted that many studies of language
acquisition fail to capture how extra-linguistic factors and individual learner differences affect the
acquisition of sociolinguistic norms (Isabelli-García, 2006). Indeed, researchers have struggled to understand why some learners reach native-like levels in sociolinguistic competence and understanding
while others maintain elements of interlanguage or do not acquire the nuances of language that carry
social value.
From a sociolinguistic perspective, the association of certain phonological variants with particular social groups or speakers has been a fundamental theme (Labov, 1972; Trudgill, 1974; Milroy and Milroy,
1985). Much research has attempted to make the connection between social stereotypes and phonological variables. For example, previous research has attempted to make the connection between the
stereotype that homosexual men speak effeminately and the sociolinguistic variables that predict this
classification (Gaudio, 1994; Linville, 1998; Rogers et al., 2000; Levon, 2006; Campbell-Kibler, 2011).
These studies have concluded that homosexual men pattern differently phonetically than heterosexual
men and that such differences are perceptible to L1 listeners. Despite the perception of “effeminate”
speech by L1 speakers, little to no research has examined the acquisition of sociolinguistic perception
abilities by L2 speakers. Such research has the potential to unearth if highly proficient L2 speakers
do acquire these sociolinguistic nuances or if L2 speakers differ from L1 speakers in perception of
linguistic variation.
As such, this study proposes a preliminary analysis of the perceived masculinity of male speakers
of Buenos Aires Spanish (N=6) by L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish. Perceived masculinity is defined
as how listeners perceive speech and how, via acoustic recordings, listeners subsequently masculinity/effeminacy to the speech segment. This work will determine 1) if L1 and L2 speakers differ in
the perception of the sociolinguistic variable under analysis and 2) how external factors such as time
spent abroad and gender affect the perception of sociolinguistic variables amongst the L2 speakers.
The variable under analysis for the current work is the realization of /s/ in Argentine Spanish. In
Spanish, pre-consonantal /s/ takes one of three realizations : realized [s], aspirated [h], or deleted [Ø]
(see 1). Previous sociolinguistic research in Spanish has established that the realized variant of [s], the
prestige variant, is associated with female speech in Buenos Aires Spanish, justifying the selection of
this variable for the work at hand (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1973).
Preliminary findings of this study provide evidence of differences between L1 and L2 perceptions of
masculinity in the male speakers. Additional external learner factors such as time spent abroad are
also examined to account for individual differentiation within the L2 population (476).
(19)
1. ca[s]co
“casco”
“helmet”
Références
Campbell-Kibler, K. (2011). Intersecting variables and perceived sexual orientation in men. American
Speech, 86(1) :52–68.
Fontanella de Weinberg, M. B. (1973). Comportamiento ante -s de hablantes femeninos y masculinos
del español bonarense. Romance Philology, 27 :50–58.
76
Gaudio, R. P. (1994). Sounding gay : Pitch properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American
speech, pages 30–57.
Isabelli-García, C. (2006). SA social networks, motivation and attitudes : Implications for second
language acquisition. Language learners in SA contexts, 15 :231–258.
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Number 4. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lapkin, S., Hart, D., and Swain, M. (1995). A canadian interprovincial exchange : Evaluating the
linguistic impact of a three-month stay in quebec. Second language acquisition in a study abroad
context, pages 67–94.
Levon, E. (2006). Hearing “gay” : Prosody, interpretation, and the affective judgments of men’s speech.
American Speech, 81(1) :56–78.
Linford, B., Zahler, S., and Whatley, M. (2013). The impact of study abroad on l2 spanish null vs.
overt subject pronoun variation. In Presentation at Second Language Research Forum. 32, Provo,
UT.
Linville, S. E. (1998). Acoustic correlates of perceived versus actual sexual orientation in men’s speech.
Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 50(1) :35–48.
Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1985). Linguistic change, social network and speaker innovation. Journal
of linguistics, 21(02) :339–384.
Regan, V. (1995). The acquisition of sociolinguistic native speech norms. Second language acquisition
in a study abroad context.
Rogers, H., Smyth, R., and Jacobs, G. (2000). Vowel and sibilant duration in gay-and straight-sounding
male speech. In International Gender and Language Association Conference, volume 1.
Schmidt, L. (2009). The effect of dialect familiarity via a study abroad experience on l2 comprehension
of spanish. In Collentine, J., editor, Selected proceedings of the 11th Hispanic linguistics symposium,
pages 143–154, Somerville. Cascadilla Proceedings.
Trudgill, P. (1974). The social differentiation of English in Norwich, volume 13. CUP Archive.
77
The maintenance of regional dialects in the social network of
children aged 10-11 years : A matter of gender ?
Jean-Pierre Chevrot1,2, Nathael Martin1, Stéphanie Barbu3
1
Lidilem, Université de Grenoble
2
Institut Universitaire de France
3
Éthologie animale et humaine, UMR 6552-CNRS, Université de Rennes 1
The linguistic diversity enduring beyond institutional pressures and social prejudices against nonstandard dialects questions the social forces influencing language maintenance across generations and
how children contribute to this process. Children encounter multi-dialectal interactions in their early
environment, and increasing evidence shows that the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation is not a
side issue but an inherent part of the general acquisition process (Chevrot and Foulkes, 2013). Despite
these recent advances in sociolinguistic acquisition, children’s sociolinguistic usages remain understudied in relation to peers’ social networks and the ability to use dialect for identity purposes.
Our study focused on the child use of several sociolinguistic variables. First, we study a grammatical sociolinguistic variable consisting in the alternation between the regional variant (y) and the
standard variants (le, la, les) of the third person object pronouns in French (for example, ‘Comment
tu y sais ?’ rather than ‘Comment tu le sais ?’ ‘How do you know ?’ ; ‘Elle y appelle des aimants’
instead of ‘Elle les appelle des aimants’ ‘She calls them magnets’). The regional variant is a remnant
of the neutral pronoun of Franco-Provençal language and its usage by adults is strongly associated
with local identity in the French Alps (Châtellain, 2004; Tuaillon, 1983). Second, we study general sociolinguistic variables which variants are found throughout the French language area (variable liaison,
variable deletion of /l/ in the third person subject pronoun, variable deletion of the post-consonantal
final /R/). A comprehensive review suggests that these general variables are sociolinguistic markers
in French in adult (Nardy, 2008).
Using questionnaires, we described the social networks of 117 10-11 year-old girls and boys living
in the same restricted rural area. Thirteen native target children (7 girls and 6 boys) were selected
from the sample, as well as 39 same-sex friends chosen according to their place of birth (native vs
non-native) and the duration of their friendship with the targets (number of years they have known
each other). The target children were recorded using wireless microphones during spontaneous dyadic
conversations with friends of each category.
Target boys, but not girls, used the local pronoun significantly more frequently with their long-term
native friends than with their non-native friends. This adjustment mirrored their partners’ usages.
Moreover, with long-term native friends, boys used the regional pronoun twice as frequently as girls.
Such pattern of results is not found for the general variables.
Boys aged 10-11 are thus capable of robust and subtle stylistic adjustments as a function of the
social position of the addressees in their network of acquaintances and as a function of the identity
value of the sociolinguistic variants. Moreover boy appear to be key actors in the maintenance and
the diffusion of regional cues in local social networks, as it is the case for adult males in very similar
contexts (Holmquist, 1985).
Références
Châtellain, L. (2004). ’J’y dis et j’y étudie’ : Les représentations et les stéréotypes d’une variation
diatopique : La variante y. Unpublished DEA dissertation, Université Stendhal, Grenoble.
Chevrot, J.-P. and Foulkes, P. (2013). Introduction : Language acquisition and sociolinguistic variation.
Linguistics, 51(2) :251 – 254.
78
Holmquist, J. (1985). Social correlates of a linguistic variable : A study in a Spanish village. Language
in Society, 14 :191 – 203.
Grenoble.
Tuaillon, G. (1983). Régionalismes grammaticaux. Recherches sur le Français Parlé, 5 :227 – 237.
79
Acquisition de la phonologie de l’anglais new-yorkais par des
immigrants hispano-caribéens
1
Patrick-André Mather1
Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras
La présente communication présente les résultats d’une enquête sociolinguistique sur l’acquisition
de la phonologie de l’anglais new-yorkais par des immigrants portoricains. Notre étude, effectuée en
2010 auprès d’une quinzaine de locuteurs, porte sur la production et l’acquisition de trois variables
linguistiques par des immigrants antillais hispanophones, à savoir le /r/ en position post-vocalique, la
voyelle antérieure ouverte /æ/ (comme dans les mots BAT/BAD)/, et la voyelle postérieure arrondie
/>/ (comme dans les mots BOUGHT et COFFEE). L’intérêt de ces trois variables est qu’elles sont
représentatives de la prononciation traditionnelle du dialecte new-yorkais (Labov, 2006; Labov et al.,
2005), en perte de vitesse depuis plusieurs décennies. En effet, des études récentes (Becker, 2010; Becker
and Coggshall, 2009; Mather, 2012) ont démontré un net recul de certains allophones du /a/ antérieur
(short-a split), ainsi que la rhotacisation généralisée du /r/ en finale de syllabe, traditionnellement
vocalisé en anglais new-yorkais. Jusqu’à présent, peu d’études ont été menées sur l’acquisition de ces
trois variables par des immigrants récents à New York. Notre travail, qui vise à combler cette lacune,
se fonde sur des questionnaires socio-démographiques et sur des enregistrements d’entretiens semidirigés et de listes de mots, analysés au moyen de logiciels d’analyse acoustique et statistique (Praat
et SPSS). Les résultats démontrent que les immigrants hispano-caribéens acquièrent certains traits
phonétiques de l’anglais new-yorkais (mais pas tous), et seulement les traits courants parmi les NewYorkais d’origine non-européenne. Plus particulièrement, la division allophonique du /a/ antérieur tend
à s’estomper, tandis que la fermeture du /o/ postérieur arrondi se maintient. Les résultats relatifs au
/r/ post-vocaliques sont moins clairs, et varient en fonction de différents facteurs liés à l’appartenance
sociale et ethnique. L’intérêt de la présente étude est de montrer que les immigrants participent aux
changements phonétiques en cours dans l’anglais new-yorkais, et qu’ils peuvent permettre de mesurer
la vitalité de ce dialecte par rapport à l’anglo-américain standard.
Références
Becker, K. (2010). Regional dialect features on the Lower East Side of New York City : Sociophonetics,
ethnicity, and identity. Unpublished PhD dissertation, New York University.
Becker, K. and Coggshall, E. L. (2009). The vowel phonologies of african american and white new
york city residents. Publication of the American Dialect Society, 94(1) :101–128.
Labov, W. (1996[2006]). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. The Center for Applied
Linguistics, Washington, DC.
Labov, W., Ash, S., and Boberg, C. (2005). The atlas of North American English : Phonetics, phonology
and sound change. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin.
Mather, P.-A. (2012). The social stratification of/r/in new york city labov’s department store study
revisited. Journal of English Linguistics, 40(4) :338–356.
80
Participants Mailing list
Agata Daleszynska
Aliyah Morgenstern
Amber Panwitz
Andrea Ender
Andrea Pamela Willi
Anna Ghimenton
Annick De Houwer
Audrey Noël
Bernadette Kushartanti
Carla Hudson Kam
Carmen Llamas
Catherine Best
Christine Czinglar
Constanze Vorwerg
Damien Chabanal
Daniela Mara Lima Oliveira Guimarães
Dorien Van De Mieroop
Eline Zenner
Elizabeth Lanza
Ella Jeffries
Emily Sullivan
Frédérique Atangana
Gunther De Vogelaer
Hans Van de Velde
Helene N. Andreassen
Irmtraud Kaiser
Isabel Repiso
Jackelyn VanBuren
Jean-Pierre Chevrot
Jeff Siegel
Jennifer Hay
Jennifer Smith
Jennifer Thorburn
Julie Auger
Karen P. Corrigan
Katharina Korecky-Kröll
Kumru Uzunkaya-Sharma
Letizia Volpin
Loïc Liégeois
Maria de Fatima Baia
Marian Oliveira
Mark Black
Martin Everaert
Meg Cychosz
Miriam Meyerhoff
Mylène Harnois-Delpiano
Mylène Lebon-Eyquem
81
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Naomi Shin
Nathael Martin
Nicholas S. Roberts
Patrick-André Mather
Paul Foulkes
Péter Racz
Rebecca Starr
Rozenn Gautier
Saioa Larraza
Sandra Benazzo
Stefania Marzo
Stephanie Barbu
Stephen Levey
Tatiana Aleksandrova
Thaïs Cristofaro Silva
Vera Pacheco
Vera Regan
Wolfgang U. Dressler
Wolfgang Wölck
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
pam [email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
82

here - Université Grenoble Alpes

Transcription

Documents pareils

Tout le monde - Level 1 Planning grid Stimulus material Flashcards

10 Marks - LangJobs

Country / Pays : England, UK - Marille

Find here a fun digital victorian dollhouse game for children (and

BAYTI Maroc (Casablanca et Essaouira)

Fêtes d`enfants Children`s Birthday Parties

Dix choses que je peux faire chez moi en utilisant les

WHAT WE OFFER CHILDREN