Effects of Variation and Variability in the Acquisition of Two Dialects of Spanish

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

Most work on language acquisition examines acquisition of language in stable and relatively homogeneous environments. In these environments typically developing children become competent speakers of the language they are exposed to quickly and efficiently. This project examines children's acquisition of grammatical properties in a much less stable but very common situation, that of language and dialect contact. Mutually intelligible dialects sometimes use the same morphological units in different ways and with different interpretations. This creates a lot of variability in the linguistic input for the learner, who then faces a linguistic situation that may provide evidence for two different and possibly incompatible grammars. Yet such children do develop their linguistic abilities and the capacity to produce and understand sentences they never heard before. Contact environments, therefore, provide a window for the researcher to examine how the learning mechanisms decide which properties of the input are "good evidence" and which are not. These environments can therefore shed light on how the learning mechanisms cope with contradictory or ambiguous input. The principle activities will be to build two corpora of naturalistic child and adult speech of the two Spanish varieties in contact (Rioplatense Spanish and Paraguayan Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, Argentina) and to analyze children's acquisition of grammatical properties, which exhibit variability across the two dialects. The completed corpora will be made available to other researchers worldwide (via the CHILDES database). Corpus analyses will be supplemented with experimental data and regular linguistic analysis with adult consultants. The goal is to provide both qualitative and quantitative results that can shed light on the nature of the language acquisition process and how it is affected by unstable variability.