Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype formation 261clusion that while phonological disambiguation might well be lexically
mediated, lectal disambiguation seems to follow a different path. Here the
link is likely to go directly from a stretch of unclassified speech to a lin-
guistic stereotype stored in a shape which reflects the experiential stage
reached by the identifier.
- Theoretical implications
In this chapter we have charted emergent patterns of lectal acquisition in
children aged 6-13 and witnessed the extent to which identification be-
comes increasingly more accurate and how type/token correspondences
remain constant across the three age groups. We furthermore saw the extent
to which the children paid attention to phonetic and suprasegmental detail
and were able to extrapolate from one instantiation (or token) to the (lin-
guistic stereo-) type and from this to members of the socially related cate-
gories. We conclude that structured models of lectal variation gradually
emerge in the course of the child ́s first six years and evolve so as to be-
come both qualitatively and quantitatively more refined and effective when
the child reaches pre-adolescence.
In section 1 we predicted that in linguistic stereotype formation structure
would be determined by usage and that purely formal characteristics (such
as phonetic salience and contrast) would have fewer effects on correct iden-
tification than relative social salience (such as social stereotyping). The
data confirms this prediction: linguistic stereotypes build on patterns of
actual usage in the child’s experiential world rather than on intrinsic lin-
guistic features. The central images of lectal categories that enable lan-
guage users to correctly and effectively identify a stretch of speech as an
instance of “accent X” seem to emerge when the child processes and asso-
ciates a stored amount of specific data relating to speech styles and social
events, accumulated in everyday experience.
In this chapter we have thus argued that lectal identification works fast
and effectively because lectal schemata that relate to the social categoriza-
tions they derive from are gradually built up on an experiential basis. In this
respect we have concluded that successful identification does not depend
primarily on the existence of especially salient structural features in a given
variety, but rather on unique combinations of linguistic features associated
with socially salient and stereotyped categorizations.