Taal en Tongval - Current Issue

While sociolinguistic research has traditionally paid much attention to what social patterns underlie variation in language, the question of how language users learn the social meanings associated with linguistic variants is still largely underexplored. In that regard, the laboratory provides a controlled environment to isolate specific aspects of the acquisition process, whereas this is more difficult to accomplish in observational data due to its inherent complexity. In this paper, based on the PRISMA methodology for systematic reviews, we present a recently developed paradigm for lab-based investigation of artificial sociolinguistic language learning that may shed a different light on results obtained from observational work. We will first introduce the paradigm methodologically, followed by a summary of theoretical advances that were made based on studies within this paradigm. Finally, the review concludes with several nuances as to the application of the paradigm as well as open questions that may be addressed through it.

Even though adolescence is well-known to be a key period for the acquisition of both language-internal variation and foreign languages, there seems to be little research on how attitudes develop during that period. This study tries to mend this gap in our knowledge by using a speaker evaluation experiment, in which both the national languages spoken in the Dutch-German border region (Dutch, German) and local dialects (Nedersaksisch, Niederdeutsch) were evaluated to get insight in the attitudinal landscape in 8 to 15-year-olds living in the area. Our results show that children at about the age of 12 enter a period in which attitudes change considerably. While Low Saxon is evaluated more clearly as a solidarity variety in the Netherlands than Low German in Germany, the association between dialect and solidarity grows stronger with age in both countries, signalling an increasing sensitivity to the covert prestige associated with the local variety. In addition, Dutch children grow an awareness of Standard German as a prestige language, whereas German children increasingly evaluate Standard Dutch as a solidarity variety, mirroring prevalent stereotypes of the neighbouring country. On a more abstract level, attitudes seem to evolve from unidimensional to more complex constructs.

Research on English singular they and Swedish hen indicates that gender-neutral pronouns for specific (nonbinary) reference are less accepted than for generic reference. This raises the question whether this greater acceptance of the generic usage of gender-neutral pronouns also applies to Dutch, a language in which the generic use of the masculine pronoun hij is still common, and in which the metadiscourse on gender-neutral pronouns mainly focuses on its nonbinary usage. We therefore conducted a study on the perception of Dutch gender-neutral die for both generic and specific reference in comparison to binary pronouns. We found that binary pronouns were preferred over gender-neutral die and that die for generic reference was more appreciated than for specific reference. All in all, the results suggest that for generic reference, the gender-neutral pronoun die shows potential as a more gender-inclusive alternative to pair forms consisting of binary pronouns and to masculine generics.

The way sociolinguistic research tends to conceptualize how social meaning is perceived is seemingly at odds with how it is conceptualized in the main cognitive speech processing theory used in sociolinguistic processing research: exemplar theory. The sociolinguistic research more broadly often focuses on how sub-lexical, often segmental variants are perceived and used to convey social meanings, while exemplar theory posits that social meaning is processed as a part of the detail in the highly detailed episodic memory traces of words, called ‘exemplars’. More recent iterations of exemplar theory, however, have opened up the possibility that representations of different sizes and levels of detail may also be used in speech processing – but it is still unclear which of these are in fact used to process social meaning. This paper presents findings from two matched accent recognition experiments, which show that listeners are able to recognize three accents (General American English, Standard Southern British English, and Yorkshire English) even in non-words, but that they perform significantly better in real words, especially if they have extensive experience with the accent they hear. This provides evidence that both sub-lexical and lexical representations play a role in sociolinguistic processing, but that lexical representations are dominant.