Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Betsy Sneller (Georgetown University)

Title: Acquisition of grammatical and sociolinguistic variation: Evidence from artificial language learning

Abstract: When faced with inconsistent input, children are found to be master generalizers (Kerswill 2003; Senghas & Coppola 2001; Singleton & Newport 2004). However, natural languages also contain meaningful variation, which a speaker must also acquire in order to be a sociolinguistically competent speaker. Some studies within sociolinguistics suggest children acquire phonological variation at fairly young ages, while others suggest that variation requires additional age or exposure (Smith, Durham & Fortune 2007; Miller 2013; Hendricks, Miller & Jackson 2018).

Here I present an artificial language study designed to test the role of age and linguistic conditioning in the acquisition of phonological variation. In natural languages, variation is typically conditioned by language-internal (grammatical) factors as well as external (social) factors. In these experiments, we test how children of different ages acquire grammatically conditioned and socially conditioned variation. We find that the youngest children show a strong tendency to regularize their inconsistent input, while older children begin to exhibit the conditioning given in the input. However, we also find an effect of the type of conditioning, with socially-conditioned variation acquired more readily by young children than grammatically-conditioned variation. These findings suggest that both speaker age and the type of conditioning both play a role in the acquisition of variable phonology.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Andres Karjus

Centre for Language Evolution