Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype formation 259riential world. The knowledge they rely on stems from personal experience
and from the media alike, but in any case it is experientially grounded and
based on social salience rather than on inherent linguistic characteristics.
Table 29. Familiarity as a subjective distance
Distinctive
featuresExclusive
featuresFrequent
featuresLinguistic
awarenessSocial
awareness
Andalucía 4 1 2 3 45
Galicia 3 1 2 2 8
Canarias 4 1 2 3 1
Argentina 3 1 1 3 41
Mexico 2 1 1 2 20
France 4 1 3 4 10
Germany 3 0 3 3 6
Br. Eng. 4 1 3 5 5
Am. Eng. 3 1 3 2 5To end this section let us address the following question: would lectal iden-
tification then at least be structurally determined in the sense that lectal
disambiguation is mediated by constructs larger than the phoneme, such as
lexical items? I.e. we realize that phonetic variants pertain to a given lect
because the words in which they occur constitute a frame (or model or con-
struction) that determines the feature as a (socially relevant) variant of a
given phonemic category? In the L1 experiment, when at the very begin-
ning of the text even the 6-7 year-olds heard the Spanish word
ten ́) pronounced with intervocalic [ʃ] or [ʒ], they immediately made use of
their pencils to categorize the accent in question as Argentinean. Was this
because the lexical context of the word
consonant corresponded to templates of a phoneme with socially derived
variants, out of which [ʃ] and [ʒ] are typical instantiations or Argentinean
lects?
In a paper entitled “Phonological development: toward a ‘‘radical’’
templatic phonology” Vihman and Croft (2007) extend the theoretical
framework of radical construction grammar to phonology. Vihman and
Croft argue that the word is the basic unit of phonological representation
just as constructions are basic and syntactic categories of particular units
are derived from the constructions. In other words, phonological disambig-
uation is lexically mediated: