Doctoral Dissertation Research: Child Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Variation

Georgetown University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Public schools in the United States are responsible for the education of more linguistically- and ethnically-diverse students than ever. A consequential part of this linguistic diversity is diversity in dialect of English spoken, as varying dialects of English characterize different socio-economic, ethnic, and racial communities and networks. Children enrolling in their first year of public schooling will exhibit the linguistic forms and patterns they have heard in input from their caregivers and the community surrounding their home environment. In many cases, the dialect learned at home may differ substantially from the variety of English used by teachers and peers. This change in input may prompt a child to alter their language, either through the development of the ability to code-switch or style-shift, or through a trade of the forms and patterns they learned from caregivers in favor of those used by their peers. A study of the mechanisms and outcomes of peer linguistic learning in a diverse peer group will add much to the understanding of first language development as well as social development at this age. This study, by focusing on a small Greater Boston metropolitan area city with an extent of ethnic, racial, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity representative of similar metropolitan areas in the region, addresses an under-representation of multi-dialectal and multi-cultural public early education communities in the region. It seeks to not only document child linguistic, social, and sociolinguistic development, but also to provide a datapoint that will inform future American early education language learning policies and practices. This study investigates the acquisition of new dialect forms and patterns of variable language through accommodation to peers in the Kindergarten classroom. Participants in the study (n=30), children in their first year of public schooling, have enrolled in a socioeconomically, ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse Kindergarten class in a small industrial city in the Greater Boston metropolitan area. Linguistic diversity includes, not only the presence of languages other than English--such as Spanish and Portuguese--among peers, but also features associated with various dialects, ethnolects, and varieties of English, such as Eastern New England English, Latino English, African American English, and phenomena associated with second-language English. Participants will be audio-recorded speaking naturally and spontaneously throughout a week of classes at 10 time-points throughout the 2017-2018 school year. These recordings will be analyzed for convergence between peers across (9) relevant sociolinguistic variables. A component tracking peer physical proximity and mutual affinities will extricate automatic processes of linguistic accommodation from the role of the social factors which have been hypothesized to mediate it in previous research. If social elements such as social group and network formation are found to influence the rate, extent, or direction of accommodation among peers across any of the contexts of variation, this will be concrete evidence of the development of sociolinguistic competence.