234 Gitte Kristiansen
of the three age groups. However, we may still observe, with satisfaction,
how the percentages decrease (in the case of no single correct answer) and
increase (in the case of one, two or three correct replies) in the right direc-
tion: while 68 percent of the 6-7 year-olds fail to correctly locate a single
speech sample at the level of province, “bad” results for the 12-13 year-olds
are down to 22 percent. Reversely, while 10 percent of the youngest child-
ren manage to identify two accents correctly, 34 percent of the oldest child-
ren are successful at this level of performance.
Table 3. Global results of Experiment 1 across age groups: percentages of correct
answers per age group and province
No. correct answers/age: province^
0 1 2 3
Age 6-7 34 10 5 1 50
68.0% 20.0% 10.0% 2.0% 100.0%
8-9 25 15 8 2 50
50.0% 30.0% 16.0% 4.0% 100.0%
12-13 11 19 17 3 50
22.0% 38.0% 34.0% 6.0% 100.0%
Total 70 44 30 6 150
46.7% 29.3% 20.0% 4.0% 100.0%At the less fine-grained level of autonomous community, we do obtain
significant results: see Table 4. The number of correctly identified accents
is now up to 5: although none of the youngest children have more than 4
correct results, 18 percent of the 12-13 year-olds successfully locate 5 ac-
cents at this level of abstraction. Again the youngest children are still learn-
ing how to build up schemas of lectal varieties: 38 percent fail to locate any
of the eight accents in a successful manner, but the figures for both the 8-9
year-olds (20 percent) and the 12-13 year-olds (2 percent) show that they
have acquired such skills in just a few years and they are now much less at
a loss. It is important to notice how systematically the scores decrease for
the bad results and begin to increase as the number of correct replies grows:
we witness how patterns in acquisitional competence emerge in systematic
manners from the age of 6 to 12.