Sociolinguistic Variation in Children's Language
Subtitle: Acquiring Community Norms
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2019
Language: eng
Number of pages: 232
ISBN-13: 9781107172616
Subjects: Language acquisition; Communicative competence
Description: How we vary our speech is fundamental in signalling who we are, where we're from and where we're going. How and when does such variation arise? Here, leading experts Jennifer Smith and Mercedes Durham address this question through a sociolinguistic analysis of the speech of preschool children in interaction with their primary caregivers. Bringing together two fields of linguistic research - variationist sociolinguistics and first language acquisition - the study focusses both qualitative and quantitative analysis of a range of variables to show when and how variation is acquired by young children, and the effect the caregiver's interaction has on this process. In doing so, they tackle a fundamental question in language research: when and how do children acquire the highly complex patterns of variation widely attested in adult speech?