ACQUISITION OF PHONOLOGICAL STRUCTURE AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIABLES : A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF SPANISH CONSONANT WEAKENING IN VENEZUELAN CHILDREN S SPEECH

ISBN-13: 9783639167825 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 180 str.

Manuel Diaz-Campos

Opis

This book analyzes the acquisition of soundsthat exhibit sociophonological variation in Spanish.Specifically, this study has analyzed the acquisitionof two variable phonological phenomena in Venezuelanchildren s speech: intervocalic /d/ andsyllable-final /-r/. 30 monolingual Spanish-speaking children wereselected from the corpus Competencia Narrativa deNiños en Edad Escolar (1996). The speakers weredivided into five groups according to age (42-47months, 48-53 months, 54-59 months, 60-65 months, and66-77 months); two groups according to socioeconomicclass (16 lower-class and 14 upper-class speakers);and two groups according to sex (16 male and 14female speakers). The findings of this study demonstrate that, from avery early age, children begin to use variablephonology with a sociolinguistic value that issimilar to that of the adult model. Children acquirefirst the sociolect of their immediate community,but, with regular exposure to other systems, theybegin not only incorporating new repertoires in theirspeech, but also assigning social value to them.

O autorze

Manuel Díaz-Campos is an Associate Professor of Hispanic
socioinguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has
published on acquisition of sociolinguistic variables in L1,
sociolinguistic variation, acquisition of second language
phonology, and topics in Spanish laboratory phonology.