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Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Acquisition across the Lifespan
Edited by Anna Ghimenton, Aurélie Nardy and Jean-Pierre Chevrot
[Studies in Language Variation 26] 2021
► pp. 295–316

Chapter 13
Adult learners’ (non-) acquisition of speaker-specific variation

ORCID logo | The University of British Columbia

This study is concerned with understanding how learners acquire sociolinguistic variation. It examines the possibility that learners gain entry into socially-conditioned variation by first associating patterns with particular speakers. Adult participants were exposed to a miniature artificial language spoken by two different speakers, each exhibiting a different variable pattern of determiner usage. After exposure, participants were tested to see if they had acquired the speaker-specific patterns using production and judgment measures. The data show no evidence that participants had learned the speaker-specific patterns. How then do learners acquire sociolinguistic variation? I suggest that learners need a more socially relevant variable to index variation to, that is, that sociolinguistic variation really is social at its core.

Keywords: sociolinguistic variation, artificial languages, acquisition
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Methods
    • Participants
    • The language and exposure stimuli
    • Experimental procedure
    • Experimental manipulation
    • Tests
      • Vocabulary
      • Sentence production
      • Determiner judgement
  • Results
    • Vocabulary test
    • Sentence production
    • Determiner judgement
  • Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.26.13hud
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