Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype
formation: an empirical study
Gitte Kristiansen
Abstract
This chapter reports on an empirical study on child language acquisition conducted
in 2007. The overall aims of the investigation were to a) address the question of
when young children acquire (receptive and active) competence of lectal varieties
and b) discuss potential predictors of the success rate: how do children acquire this
knowledge? How do they learn to correlate tokens with types as effectively as they
do? Adopting a usage-based approach to lectal stereotype formation we predict
that structure is determined by use and that purely formal characteristics (such as
phonetic salience and contrast) will have less effect on correct identification than
relative social salience (such as social stereotyping).
The chapter evolves in five main steps. In the Introduction we briefly provide
an outline of the theoretical background within which the experiment is embedded.
Section 2 describes the design and the results of the first experiment conducted,
which aimed to assess the degree of identifiability of L1 accents in young children.
Section 3 in turn outlines the design and the findings of the second experiment, on
correct identification of L2 accents by the same age group as in experiment 1. In
section 4 we address the explanatory dimension by analyzing the data collected in
a questionnaire distributed to the subjects. Finally, we discuss the theoretical im-
plications of the findings.
Keywords: language acquisition, cognitive dialectology, linguistic stereotype for-
mation, lectal disambiguation, template-based categorization
- Introduction
In previous publications (Kristiansen 2001, 2003, 2006, 2008) I have ar-
gued in favor of a usage-based prototype-theoretical approach to lectal
categorization, perception and awareness. Viewing lectal variation (e.g.
variation at the level of dialects, accents, registers, styles etc.) from the