258 Gitte Kristiansen
x Maradona and other Argentinean players (3 replies)
x characters in the TV series Hospital Central and Rebelde (9 responses)
8-9 year-olds
x Mateo (2 responses)
x Mateo ́s parents (6)
x characters in the TV series Rebelde (1)
What do these examples tell us about social awareness in relation to lectal
categorization? The children do seem to build up a lot of knowledge from
their most immediate surroundings, i.e. the school and family environment
and the TV. For the latter factor it seems to matter most what they watch
and not how much they watch. In early 2007 when the tests were distri-
buted, the Argentinean youth series “Rebelde Way” (together with its Mex-
ican follow-up sister series “Rebelde”) was very popular amongst Spanish
teenagers. The responses of the 12-13 year-olds reflect this fact very well
against the single reference to the series on the part of a listener from the 8-
9 age group. In turn, 8 listeners aged 8-9 mentioned “Mateo” or “Mateo’s
parents” as an example of someone speaking with an Argentinean accent.
Mateo was a child with an Argentinean background who happened to be in
one of the classes in which the test was placed. Popular singers and football
players whose voices are heard in the media also rated high in the response
form. The media do play a role, then, as do personal experiences with
people in the most immediate environment. The comparatively bad results
for the non-native accents can in part be explained by the fact that foreign
languages are invariably dubbed on TV in Spain. An additional contextual
factor involves L2 teaching. Bilingual educational programmes in which
native English teachers participate as auxiliaries are becoming increasingly
widespread in Spain and English speech is thus heard by the children from
the time when most of them begin school, i.e. at the “pre-school” or kin-
dergarten level at the age of 3. However, most of the children who partici-
pated in the experiments in 2007 had begun foreign language instruction in
English at the age of 6, in their first year of compulsory education – and
more often than not their English teachers did not speak with an English
accent.
In Table 29 we specify the quantitative references made by the children
to the accents identified (excluding the Spanish reference accents). It is
obvious that these results do reflect the success rate in a quite transparent
manner. Regardless of objective distinctive and exclusive features and lin-
guistic frequencies, the children rated the accents in accordance with sche-
mas built up around familiar people and characters in their immediate expe-