Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype formation 231

formal message left on an answering machine (e.g. by a close friend,
spouse or relative). The fragment, which topic-wisely discussed practical
affairs such as buying presents, going to the cinema and having dinner af-
terwards, was constituted by the following brief text:

¿Que tal? Oye, te llamo para decirte que no hace falta que cojas un regalo

para Juan. Ya le he comprado los barcos que vimos el jueves. El rojo y el

azul. Creo que todo iría más rápido si tú te haces cargo de lo otro. Te veo

esta noche en el cine. Y por favor, esta vez no te olvides de sacar las entra-

das. Me apetece cenar después. ¿Crees que vas a tener tiempo? Bueno,

¡hasta entonces!

The duration of the speech samples was below 30 seconds for all eight
speakers. The stimuli were presented to the children in random order:

(1) Andalucía (Seville, female)

(2) Galicia (Lugo, female)

(3) Community of Madrid (metropolitan Madrid, male)

(4) Andalucía (Seville, male)

(5) Galicia (Pontevedra, male)

(6) Gran Canarias (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, male)

(7) Community of Madrid (metropolitan Madrid, male)

(8) Gran Canarias (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, male)

Both male and female speakers participated, but gender was not believed to
have a bearing on the results and was not treated as an independent varia-
ble.
The eight speech samples were successively located by the test subjects
with respect to a three-level response form so as to elicit not only paradig-
matic choices among regions (e.g. Asturias, Extremadura, Valencia) but
also levels of specificity: the children were told to provide one answer only
at a level at which they felt “safe” about the response, and if in doubt at the
highest level of certainty. The response form, as shown in Table 1 below,
did not reflect dialect areas and dialect continua as a linguist would depict
them, but rather geographical and socio-political constructs at different
levels of granularity: frequent and familiar place names readily evoked, or
so we assume, by means of a metonymic association between place of ori-
gin and speech style when a stretch of unclassified speech is correlated with
a series of prototypically organized models, or linguistic stereotypes, on the
basis of relative similarity.