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Background and aim | Cognitive sociolinguistics investigates the mental processes underlying the acquisition of socially-meaningful variation patterns (see e.g. Kristiansen & Dirven 2008). So far, studies focusing on children’s development have found mixed results regarding age patterns. For instance, Kristiansen (2010) investigated N=150 Spanish-speaking children (6-13 y/o) and found their identification of Spanish regional varieties improves with age. Yet, variation between children persisted, which Kristiansen connects to children’s differing bottom-up experience with individual speakers of the Spanish varieties. Similarly, Zenner et al. (2021) and Kaiser (2022) found general age trajectories accompanied by idiosyncrasies at the micro-level. Adding to these previous studies, this paper aims to shed more light on the role of age in children’s development of social meaning.
Method | To address the research aim, we investigate how children in Flanders develop the social meaning of English lexemes in Belgian Dutch. The study is based on a large multi-methods research project investigating N=26 Belgian Dutch-speaking preadolescents (6-13 y/o, 12 boys and 14 girls). The preadolescents participated in 8 methods, among which are a sociolinguistic interview, roleplay tasks, a metalinguistic interview and peer group conversations. The resulting corpus consists of 131 hours of video recordings (7h per participant) and includes over 70,000 child utterances. In the corpus, all English lexemes were identified following an extensive identification protocol (Authors 2022).
Results| A bird’s eye perspective on 4 studies | Based on the multi-methods corpus, we conducted 4 quantitative studies. Study 1 investigates children’s use of English lexemes in a Dutch roleplay task. The findings demonstrate children use more English for roles like rapper and soccer player (25% of English) than for those of farmer and minister (5% of English). No age effects were found. Study 2 adds data from a questionnaire and a metalinguistic interview to the roleplay data. Here too, no clear age effects could be identified. Next, Study 3 zooms in on English in the participants’ conversations with a researcher. We find an overall frequency of 3% of English which, again, is not stratified by age. Lastly, in Study 4, we zoom in on the participants’ use of English vs. Dutch evaluative adjectives in a peer group context. Relying on the participants' own assessment of their age group, age does turn out to play a role, with older participants (7%) inserting more English adjectives than younger participants (<1%).
Implications | Overall, the findings illustrate the complexity of the age variable: while most studies did not reveal age stratification, study 4 did. Theoretically, we discuss these findings with regard to the usage-based learning mechanism of exemplar theory (Docherty & Foulkes 2014): idiosyncrasies in the data are potentially due to children’s diversified bottom-up exemplars. Methodologically, we reflect on the importance of triangulating methods and argue for the promotion of ‘social’ rather than 'chronological' age in cognitive sociolinguistics (Eckert 1997).
References
Docherty, Gerard & Paul Foulkes. (2014). An evaluation of usage-based approaches to the modelling of sociophonetic variability. Lingua, 142, 42-56.
Eckert, P. (1997). Age as a Sociolinguistic Variable. In Florian Coulmas (Ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 151–167. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kaiser, I. (2022). Children’s linguistic repertoires across dialect and standard speech: Mirroring input or co-constructing sociolinguistic identities?. Language Learning and Development, 18(1), 41-61.
Kristiansen, G. & Dirven, R. (Eds.). (2008). Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Language variation, cultural models, social systems. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter
Kristiansen, G. (2010). Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype formation: an empirical study. In Advances in cognitive sociolinguistics, 225-263. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Schuring, M., & Zenner, E. (2022). English from scratch: Preadolescents’ developing use of English lexical resources in Belgian Dutch. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 788768.
Zenner, E., Rosseel, L., & Speelman, D. (2021). Starman or Sterrenman: An acquisitional perspective on the social meaning of English in Flanders. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(3), 568-591.
| Principal domain of study | English linguistics and applied linguistics |
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