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