Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype formation 2534.4. Linguistic awareness as a subjective distance
If the reasons behind the success rate do not primarily lie in the language, it
will rather be a matter of usage. Let us accordingly now turn to factors that
pertain to the users and to patterns of language usage. To what extent are
children aware of the features they make use of in order to evoke lectal
schemata? For each speech fragment the 150 children were asked what they
observed in the speaker’s pronunciation that made them think he/she was
from the area in question. There is no guarantee that the objective linguistic
differences discussed above were actually perceived as such by the listen-
ers, but the features they did perceive are likely to be highly salient and
contrastive, and if lectal schemata arise in a bottom-up fashion, the more
features reported on and the higher the level of awareness, the more en-
trenched a lectal categorisation should in theory be. So which features did
they report on and how many were mentioned? Table 25 captures these two
dimensions.
In total there were 32 references to the various instantiations of /s/ in the
fragments from Andalucía (e.g. /s/ dropping, alternations between /s/ and
/Ɵ/) which are indeed typical and frequently quoted features of this region.
Two children however also observed that
in a more aspirated manner than the clearly fricative /x/ in the speech of
Madrid. This is a feature which was not deemed to be perceptually salient
enough to be included as an objective variant in Table 20 above, but a few
of the children still captured the distinctiveness of the pronunciation. In the
case of the Canarian islands, 14 children mention variants of /s/, 2 refer to
the aspiration of /x/ and 1 child comments on /t/. For the accents from Gali-
cia the children also mention two variables: 4 refer to different realizations
of /s/ (such as the fact that the speakers do pronounce them) and there are
as many as 10 references to differences in intonation patterns. This leads us
to think that Galician speech was less objectively non-distinctive for the
children than hypothesized in section 2 (cf. Table 1). Tone units seem to be
perceived almost as readily as a missing allomorph. This is of course only
in consonance with usage-based theories such as exemplar-based models
(e.g. Bybee 2001, 2003, Pierrehumbert 2001) according to which linguistic
representation is shaped by speakers ́ memories of specific tokens of lin-
guistic features. Phonetic detail is not discarded but stored in long-term
memory, and so are subtle differences in intonation patterns.