Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype formation 2413.2. Results and discussion
From a global perspective, the three age groups perfomed as in Table 8.
The table represents the percentage of correct answers across the three age
groups for the seven speech samples. Let us note once again how successful
performance increases systematically and significantly: 28 percent of the 6-
7 year-olds were only able to recognize one accent correctly (and as we
shall see in brief in the vast majority of the cases this was their own native
accent: peninsular Spanish), but this low score is down to 10 percent in the
case of the 8-9 year-olds and 0 percent for the 12-13 year-olds. In turn,
none of the youngest children have 7 correct answers, but 8 percent of the
teenagers do. The highest percentage of correct answers falls in the upper
middle of the range: almost half of the 12-13 year-olds (24 out of 50) have
4 correct answers out of 7 and almost one quarter (24 percent) have 5. We
may thus safely conclude that awareness of non-native lectal varieties in-
crease systematically in children in a time span of six years, reaching a
fairly high level of precision in early adolescence.
Table 8. Global results of Experiment 2 across age groups
Number of correct answers/age group: all 7 countries Total
1 2 3 4 5 7
Age 6-7
14 18 7 5 6 0 50
28.0% 36.0% 14.0% 10.0% 12.0% .0% 100.0%
8-9
5 18 10 8 7 2 50
10.0% 36.0% 20.0% 16.0% 14.0% 4.0% 100.0%
12-13
0 3 7 24 12 4 50
.0% 6.0% 14.0% 48.0% 24.0% 8.0% 100.0%
Total 19 39 24 37 25 6 150
12.7% 26.0% 16.0% 24.7% 16.7% 4.0% 100.0%Let us now cast a deeper glance at the data. Which languages or accents
were more readily recognized than others? Table 9 illustrates the percen-
tages for the three L1 accents (Argentinean, Mexican and peninsular Span-
ish).The success rate of the 6-7 year-olds has now increased to 12 percent
and the 12-13 year-olds perform with much accuracy on this dimension: 41
out of 50 test subjects knew who spoke with an Argentinean, a Mexican or
a peninsular Spanish accent.