Chapter 1. The sociophonetic orientation of the language learner 19
type each individual forms a grammar that is informed primarily by the initial
input and is the unique product of his or her individual experience. The other type
is programmed to keep smoothing the result with data from following contacts (up
to a certain limit). This second type is outwardly bound, in the sense that it searches
for the community pattern as epistemologically prior to the individual pattern.
The suggestion here is that from an evolutionary point of view, the second
type will survive, and has survived, at the expense of the first.
Most readers will have personal evidence that children do not adopt those
features of their parents’ dialect that fail to match the pattern of the surrounding
community. Linguists are especially conscious of such mismatches with their par-
ents or with their children. For my general argument, I will want to go beyond this
personal experience and consider systematic studies of this process.
- Rejection of parental idiosyncrasy
2.1 The King of Prussia study
A clear view of how children reject their parents’ dialect can be drawn from that
part of the Philadelphia Neighborhood Study which was designed by Payne (1976,
1980). For the upper middle class neighborhood, she selected King of Prussia, a
new suburb that barely existed in the 1940s. A rapid development of electronic and
chemical industries drew half of the population from metropolitan Philadelphia
and half from out-of-state communities with very different vowel systems:
Massachusetts, New York, and Cleveland.
Payne’s study included the acquisition of the Philadelphia dialect by 34 chil-
dren of out-of-state parents. In Figure 1, the vertical axis is the percent of children
who consistently rejected their parents’ dialect in favor of the Philadelphia pattern.
From left to right we have the fronting of (aw) to [ɛo] or [eɔ], the centralization
of /ay/ before voiceless finals in like, right, fight before voiceless consonants, the
fronting of (ow) in go, boat, road, the raising of the nucleus of (oy) in choice, boy,
and the fronting of (uw) in do, dew, move, etc.
The two upper lines show that the majority of children who spent at least
half of their formative years in Philadelphia departed from their parents’ pat-
tern consistently – those who arrived from birth to 4 and from 5 to 9 years old.
Those who came later did not, except for the fronting of /ow/. But conversely
it should be noted that a third at least still showed some traces of the parental
system. Though parents are not the target of language learning, they are not
without influence.