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Project

Acquiring social meaning of language variation: an experimental exploration

 Language varies in many different ways. People for instance use different words to refer to the same object or they pronounce words in various ways. Listeners often associate this language variation with presumed social attributes of the speaker (e.g. level of education). This is referred to as the social meaning of language variation. This project studies how people learn this type of sociolinguistic meaning. More concretely, the project aims to answer four questions about this acquisition process. (1) We look at the role of memory in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning. This involves answering questions like: how quickly do people pick up new social meanings and how quickly do they forget them again? (2) We compare the ability of children and adults to learn new sociolinguistic meanings. Do children learn these meanings more easily than adults, as is generally the case for language learning? Or do adults have an advantage, because they have more experience with language? The final two questions relate to the types of language elements and associations people can learn. (3) Are any parts of linguistic structure (i.e. words vs. sounds vs. morphosyntactic elements like suffixes) more prone to pick up sociolinguistic meaning? (4) And how quickly do listeners generalize from concrete associations between language features and groups of speakers (e.g. social class groups) to more abstract social meanings based on stereotypes linked to those groups (e.g. intelligence)?
 

Date:1 Nov 2019 →  15 Nov 2019
Keywords:sociolinguistics, language attitudes, social meaning of language variation, developmental sociolinguistics, acquisition of social meaning
Disciplines:Developmental linguistics, Language acquisition, Sociolinguistics