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The acquisition of newly emerging sociophonetic variation: /str-/ in American English*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2013

BEN RUTTER
BEN RUTTER*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Abstract

Eight children aged 4;1–8;1 and their primary caregivers participated in a study designed to evaluate their use of the onset cluster /str-/ in both read and conversational speech. The cluster is currently undergoing a reported sound change in many varieties of English, with the initial /s/ being retracted to [ʃ]. The study compared the initial fricative of the cluster in both the children and their mothers. Acoustic analysis was carried out in order to categorize tokens as either [s] or [ʃ] using spectral peak analysis. Results found that children as young as 5;1 were starting to exhibit the usage patterns of their mothers. The distribution of the novel variant suggests that the children may be learning this form via a process of lexical diffusion rather than by rule. Implications for the study of dialect acquisition and phonological acquisition in general are discussed.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 1166 - 1178
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

Address for correspondence: University of Sheffield, 31 Claremont Crescent, Sheffield, South Yorkshire S102TA, United Kingdom. e-mail: b.rutter@sheffield.ac.uk

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