Foulkes, P. & Docherty, G. (2006). The social life of phonetics and phonology. Journal of Phonetics, 34 (4), 409-438.
Presentation: Renee
Summary: Shelly
This study investigates acquisition of language variation from a sociophonetic aspect. The fieldwork was done among children of the working class in Newcastle. The target phone for observation was the word-medial /t/ with laryngealization, and word-final prepausal /t/ with preaspiration. Previous studies showed that the word-medial laryngealized /t/ is mostly used by males and the working class, and word-final preaspiration /t/ by females and the young generation. In the present study, it is found that such variation between genders, classes, and generations is correlated with the input to the children from their mothers. For laryngealized /t/, the possibility for a mother to use it to a boy is higher than to a girl. To a girl, a mother uses much more plain /t/ than laryngealized /t/. For preaspiration /t/, it was found that there exists a positive correlation between the mother’s usage and the child’s usage, and the gender differentiation emerged among older children, which showed that girls use more preasiration /t/ than boys. The gender differences found in the present study highly correspond to the findings on adults. The author used the exemplar-based model to explain such phenomenon, saying that the cognitive representations of words contains not only linguistic information, but also social indexical information (such as gender, class, and ages). Children will first acquire these variations according to the exemplars they store. The more exemplars of one variation they encounter, the higher the possibility for them to acquire this variation. However, as children grow up, they will accumulate more social indexical information of the exemplars, and gradually they would have biases towards those exemplars used by people coded with the same social index as the children. Therefore, boys will be biased towards males’ variation, and girls will be biased towards females’. As time goes by, these social variations on phonetics will be acquired by children.
Summary: Shelly
This study investigates acquisition of language variation from a sociophonetic aspect. The fieldwork was done among children of the working class in Newcastle. The target phone for observation was the word-medial /t/ with laryngealization, and word-final prepausal /t/ with preaspiration. Previous studies showed that the word-medial laryngealized /t/ is mostly used by males and the working class, and word-final preaspiration /t/ by females and the young generation. In the present study, it is found that such variation between genders, classes, and generations is correlated with the input to the children from their mothers. For laryngealized /t/, the possibility for a mother to use it to a boy is higher than to a girl. To a girl, a mother uses much more plain /t/ than laryngealized /t/. For preaspiration /t/, it was found that there exists a positive correlation between the mother’s usage and the child’s usage, and the gender differentiation emerged among older children, which showed that girls use more preasiration /t/ than boys. The gender differences found in the present study highly correspond to the findings on adults. The author used the exemplar-based model to explain such phenomenon, saying that the cognitive representations of words contains not only linguistic information, but also social indexical information (such as gender, class, and ages). Children will first acquire these variations according to the exemplars they store. The more exemplars of one variation they encounter, the higher the possibility for them to acquire this variation. However, as children grow up, they will accumulate more social indexical information of the exemplars, and gradually they would have biases towards those exemplars used by people coded with the same social index as the children. Therefore, boys will be biased towards males’ variation, and girls will be biased towards females’. As time goes by, these social variations on phonetics will be acquired by children.
No comments:
Post a Comment