Acquiring variation in an artificial language: Children and adults are sensitive to socially conditioned linguistic variation

Anna Samara,Kenny Smith,Helen Brown,Elizabeth Wonnacott

doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.02.004

Abstract

Languages exhibit sociolinguistic variation, such that adult native speakers condition the usage of linguistic variants on social context, gender, and ethnicity, among other cues. While the existence of this kind of socially conditioned variation is well-established, less is known about how it is acquired. Studies of naturalistic language use by children provide various examples where children’s production of sociolinguistic variants appears to be conditioned on similar factors to adults’ production, but it is difficult to determine whether this reflects knowledge of sociolinguistic conditioning or systematic differences in the input to children from different social groups. Furthermore, artificial language learning experiments have shown that children have a tendency to eliminate variation, a process which could potentially work against their acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. The current study used a semi-artificial language learning paradigm to investigate learning of the sociolinguistic cue of speaker identity in 6-year-olds and adults. Participants were trained and tested on an artificial language where nouns were obligatorily followed by one of two meaningless particles and were produced by one of two speakers (one male, one female). Particle usage was conditioned deterministically on speaker identity (Experiment 1), probabilistically (Experiment 2), or not at all (Experiment 3). Participants were given tests of production and comprehension. In Experiments 1 and 2, both children and adults successfully acquired the speaker identity cue, although the effect was stronger for adults and in Experiment 1. In addition, in all three experiments, there was evidence of regularization in participants’ productions, although the type of regularization differed with age: children showed regularization by boosting the frequency of one particle at the expense of the other, while adults regularized by conditioning particle usage on lexical items. Overall, results demonstrate that children and adults are sensitive to speaker identity cues, an ability which is fundamental to tracking sociolinguistic variation, and that children’s well-established tendency to regularize does not prevent them from learning sociolinguistically conditioned variation.

Highlights

Variation is ubiquitous in natural language and occurs at all levels of analysis, be it phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic, or lexical
Can young children pick up on the fact that different speakers use different variants, even when that relationship is probabilistic? How does the learning of socially conditioned variation interact with their well-demonstrated tendency to regularize experimenter-created miniature languages that exhibit fully unpredictable variation? The current paper explores these questions using a statistical learning framework, comparing children’s and adults’ learning of a form of sociolinguistic variation in an artificial language
The results suggest that both child language acquisition and learning and usage of languages by adults might play a role in removing unpredictable variation from natural language

Summary

Introduction

Variation is ubiquitous in natural language and occurs at all levels of analysis, be it phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic, or lexical. A clear example of deterministic conditioning is the regular past tense marker in English (written as –ed), which can be realized as [t], [d], or syllabic [ɪd] (as in liked, loved, hated), with the choice of variant dependent on the phonological features of the final segment of the stem. In English, a final (–t, d) segment in a final cluster is variably deleted (nest vs nes’) with the probability of deletion affected by a variety of linguistic factors, including the phonological features of the following segment (e.g., /t/ or /d/ followed by an obstruent is more likely to be deleted than /t/ or /d/ followed by a liquid), morphological class (e.g., final /t/ or /d/ in monomorphemes delete more frequently than weak past tense forms) and the presence of a following pause, as well as social factors such as the speaker’s gender and social context. We will refer to patterns of variation involving these latter kinds of social conditioning factors as sociolinguistic

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Conclusion