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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 42:2 (2021) ► pp.145–174

“I just sound Sco[ʔ]ish now”

The acquisition of word-medial glottal replacement by Polish adolescents in Glasgow

| Manchester Metropolitan University

This article investigates the speech of adolescents who have moved directly from Poland to Glasgow, using data from a range of social contexts and comparing their speech to that of their locally-born peer-group. Focusing on the acquisition of word-medial glottal replacement, I find that the Polish participants have replicated one of the constraints shown by their locally-born peers (number of syllables), have come close to replicating another (following segment), and have three which are not significant for the Glaswegians: lexical frequency, preceding segment and speech context. The emergence of the speech context constraint for the Polish group (and not for the Glaswegians) is a novel finding, and sheds light on how learners come to understand and negotiate style in the L2. I suggest that as they are going through the acquisition process, the Polish group use speech context as an interpretive framework around which they structure their stylistic variation.

Keywords: sociolinguistic variation, migration, style, L2, adolescence, second language acquisition, glottal replacement, t-glottaling, Glasgow
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
    • 2.1Acquiring stylistic constraints in a new language
    • 2.2Glottal replacement
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1The participants
    • 3.2The speech data
  • 4.Analysis and results
    • 4.1Circumscribing the variable context
    • 4.2Coding the variants
    • 4.3Statistical modelling
    • 4.4Potential constraints
    • 4.5Comparison of the groups
    • 4.6Stages of acquisition
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00066.dur
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