Sociolinguistic Variation In Childrens Language

Investigates when and how preschool children acquire the vernacular norms of the community they come from.

This volume provides a broad coverage of the intersection of sociolinguistic variation and language acquisition. Favoured by the current scientific context where interdisciplinarity is particularly encouraged, the chapters bring to light the complementarity between the social and cognitive approaches to language acquisition. The book integrates sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic issues by bringing together scholars who have been developing conceptions of language acquisition across the lifespan that take into account language-internal and cross-linguistic variation in contexts of both first and second language acquisition as well as of first and second dialect acquisition. The volume brings together theoretical and empirical research and provides an excellent basis for scholars and students wanting to delve into the social and cognitive dimensions of both the production and perception of sociolinguistic variation. The book enables the reader to understand, on the one hand, how variation is acquired in childhood or at a later stage and, on the other, how perception and production feed into one another, thus building up our understanding of the social meanings underpinning language variation.

This book investigates the acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in the early elementary school years of a Mandarin-English two-way immersion program in the United States. Using ethnographic observation and quantitative analysis of data, the author explores how input from teachers and classmates shapes students’ language acquisition. The book considers the different sociolinguistic messages conveyed by teachers in their patterns of language use and the variety of dialects negotiated and represented. Using analysis of teacher speech, corrective feedback and student language use, the author brings together three analyses to form a more complete picture of how children respond to sociolinguistic variation within a two-way immersion program.

Language acts are acts of identity, and linguistic variation reflects the multifaceted construction of verbal alternatives for transmitting social meaning, where style-shifting represents our ability to take up different social positions due to its potential for linguistic performance, rhetorical stance-taking and identity projection.Traditional variationist conceptualizations of style-shifting as a primarily responsive phenomenon seem unable to account for all stylistic choices. In contrast, more recent formulations see stylistic variation as initiative, creative and strategic in personal and interpersonal identity construction and projection, making a significant contribution to our understanding of this aspect of sociolinguistic variation. In this volume social constructivist approaches to style-shifting are further developed by bringing together research which suggests that people make stylistic choices aimed at conveying (and achieving) a particular social categorization, sociolinguistic meaning, and/or to project a specific positioning in society. Therefore, there is a need, we collectively argue, to adopt permeable and flexible multidimensional, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to speaker agency that take into consideration not only reactive but also proactive motivations for stylistic variation, and where individuals – rather than groups – and their strategies are the main focus when examining style-shifting in public. This book will be of interest to advanced students and academics in the areas of sociolinguistics, dialectology, social psychology, anthropology and sociology.

Twenty-four linguists analyze natural and social differences in language form, use, and attitudes.

In acquiring communicative competence, children must learn to speak not only grammatically but also appropriately. Although rules for appropriate language use may vary from culture to culture, they are usually sensitive across languages to many of the same factors, including the context and the topic of the discourse, and the sex, age, familiarity and relative status of the speaker and the listener. There is available detailed evidence of the ways in which adults consistently modify their speech to foreigners, of phonological, syntactic, and lexical markings of language in professional settings, and of differences in men's and women's speech that are tied to their roles in society. This book examines young children's knowledge of the sociolinguistic rules that govern appropriate language use, exploring (i) the repertoire of registers (ie speech varieties) that young children possess; (ii) the linguistic devices that they use to mark distinct registers; (iii) the way their skill in using these registers develops.

The study of how linguistic variation is acquired is considered a nascent field in both psycho- and sociolinguistics. Within that research context, this book aims at two objectives. First, it wants to help bridging the gap between researchers working on acquisition from different theoretical backgrounds. The book therefore includes contributions by both psycho- and sociolinguists, and by representatives of further relevant sub-disciplines of linguistics, including historical linguistics and dialectology. Second, in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison, the book brings together research carried out in different sociolinguistic constellations, as most obviously found in different language areas or different countries.

In recent years the field has seen an increasing realisation that the full complexity of language acquisition demands theories that (a) explain how children integrate information from multiple sources in the environment, (b) build linguistic representations at a number of different levels, and (c) learn how to combine these representations in order to communicate effectively. These new findings have stimulated new theoretical perspectives that are more centered on explaining learning as a complex dynamic interaction between the child and her environment. This book is the first attempt to bring some of these new perspectives together in one place. It is a collection of essays written by a group of researchers who all take an approach centered on child-environment interaction, and all of whom have been influenced by the work of Elena Lieven, to whom this collection is dedicated.

In acquiring communicative competence, children must learn to speak not only grammatically but also appropriately. Although rules for appropriate language use may vary from culture to culture, they are usually sensitive across languages to many of the same factors, including the context and the topic of the discourse, and the sex, age, familiarity and relative status of the speaker and the listener. There is available detailed evidence of the ways in which adults consistently modify their speech to foreigners, of phonological, syntactic, and lexical markings of language in professional settings, and of differences in men’s and women’s speech that are tied to their roles in society. This book examines young children’s knowledge of the sociolinguistic rules that govern appropriate language use, exploring (i) the repertoire of registers (ie speech varieties) that young children possess; (ii) the linguistic devices that they use to mark distinct registers; (iii) the way their skill in using these registers develops.