Samara Anna, Smith Kenny, Brown Helen, Wonnacott Elizabeth
Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, United Kingdom.
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Cogn Psychol. 2017 May;94:85-114. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.02.004. Epub 2017 Mar 21.
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.
语言呈现出社会语言学变异，以至于成年母语使用者会根据社会语境、性别、种族等线索来决定语言变体的使用。虽然这种受社会条件制约的变异的存在已得到充分证实，但对于它是如何习得的却知之甚少。对儿童自然语言使用的研究提供了各种例子，其中儿童对社会语言学变体的产出似乎与成年人的产出受类似因素的制约，但很难确定这是否反映了对社会语言学制约的了解，还是不同社会群体向儿童提供的输入存在系统性差异。此外，人工语言学习实验表明，儿童有消除变异的倾向，这一过程可能会阻碍他们对社会语言学变异的习得。当前的研究使用了一种半人工语言学习范式，来调查6岁儿童和成年人对说话者身份这一社会语言学线索的学习情况。参与者在一种人工语言上接受训练和测试，在这种语言中，名词后面必须跟两个无意义的词素之一，且由两个说话者（一男一女）之一说出。词素的使用根据说话者身份被确定性地制约（实验1）、概率性地制约（实验2）或完全不被制约（实验3）。对参与者进行了产出和理解测试。在实验1和实验2中，儿童和成年人都成功习得说话者身份线索，尽管对成年人的影响更强，且在实验1中效果更明显。此外，在所有三个实验中，都有证据表明参与者的产出存在规则化现象，尽管规则化的类型因年龄而异：儿童通过提高一个词素的频率而降低另一个词素的频率来实现规则化，而成年人则通过根据词汇项目来制约词素的使用来实现规则化。总体而言，结果表明儿童和成年人对说话者身份线索很敏感，这是追踪社会语言学变异的一项基本能力，而且儿童既定的规则化倾向并不会妨碍他们学习受社会语言学条件制约的变异。
