Summary of Journal Linguistic 3

Journal Linguistic 3 

Reference : Wagner, Laura. Clopper, Cynthia G.  Pate, John K. 2014. Children's perception of dialect variation. Journal of Child Language. Vol 41/05 (2014) pp. 62-84

This article was talking about dialect on children. These results of this article demonstrate five- to six-year-old children’s developing perceptual skill with dialect, and suggest that they have a gradient representation of dialect variation. This strand of research is important for documenting children’s abilities in production, and the extreme rigor with which children’s phonological features have been analyzed makes these data especially compelling. The finding that children first acquire the dialect of their parents is not particularly surprising – it is simply a way of saying that children acquire the features of the language they are primarily exposed to. Of more importance is the fact that children can shift their dialect as their social experience expands beyond the family, and further that their shifting is governed in part by social factors. Children appear to be sensitive to indexical features in their input and have at least some nascent understanding of how to link those features to social categories. However, these naturalistic studies suffer from two problems. First, they rely on children’s spontaneous production. Although speech production is an important data source, it may not be a wholly accurate reflection of children’s knowledge; children may be sensitive to distinctions they do not make themselves in spontaneous free production. Second, these studies have used quite small samples of participants – in some cases, the samples have consisted of fewer than five children. Thus, one might reasonably worry about whether these results will truly generalize to the population more widely.