This sociophonetic study examines affricate variation through a continuous lens using diachronic data from Caracas Spanish. We investigate the relationship between frication and occlusion period duration in affricate segments across two steps. First, we present a phonetic characterization of the dependent variable and its variants. Second, we…

Although recent research suggests that gains are made in the acquisition of dialectal features during study abroad, the few studies that have been conducted on this topic in Spanish-speaking contexts have focused primarily on features characteristic of Spain. This article examines the L2 acquisition of phonological features characteristic of…

Iterated learning models of language evolution have typically been used to study the emergence of language, rather than historical language change. We use iterated learning models to investigate historical change in the accent classes of two Korean dialects. Simulations reveal that many of the patterns of historical change can be explained as…

To become a native speaker, beyond obligatory rules, children need to learn systematic variation in the language, as it is present at all levels of language structure and is an integral part of linguistic knowledge. To give an example in English, speakers sometimes pronounce words ending in -ing with -in' (e.g., working vs. workin') depending on…

Recent empirical research in sociolinguistics and social psychology has established the existence of the socio-psychological phenomena known as linguistic stereotyping (LS) and reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS), which have an implicit or unconscious effect on listeners' perception of speech and speakers. Despite such findings, little research…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

English is clarified as a Germanic language, and it began in what is now the British-Isles. After years of development, English language has many varieties in different parts of the world. Different varieties differ in accent, vocabulary, grammar, discourse, sociolinguistics, and have its respective characteristics in pronunciation, tone,…

Direct object clitics in Latin American Spanish are subject to great variability in features across dialects. Variability also characterizes bilingual acquisition and especially clitic doubling structures in language contact contexts. We focus on the distribution of clitics and Differential Object Marking (DOM) in clitic doubling structures among…

This study sheds light on the socio-economic factors determining the (re)location of sociolinguistic prestige in postcolonial environments. It uses the case of Namibia, an ethnolinguistically diverse African country that replaced Afrikaans -- an established lingua franca -- with English as its official language to weaken the hold of the formerly…

Within a language, there is considerable variation in the pronunciations of words owing to social factors like age, gender, nationality, and race. In the present study, we investigate whether toddlers link social and linguistic variation during word learning. In Experiment 1, 24- to 26-month-old toddlers were exposed to two talkers whose front…

Traditionally, Basque has three voiceless affricates that are different in their place of articulation. More precisely, affricates can have a lamino-alveolar, apico-alveolar, and prepalatal place of articulation and the graphemes used to represent them are respectively. Likewise, Basque has been described as having three fricatives with the same…

This study investigated the developmental trajectories of three perceptual domains related to regional dialect competence: the linguistic domain, tested through an intelligibility in noise task; the objective indexical domain, tested through locality judgments and a free classification task; and the subjective indexical domain, tested through…

Language and accent strongly influence the formation of social groups. By five years of age, children already show strong social preferences for peers who speak their native language with a familiar accent (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, & Spelke, 2009). However, little is known about the factors that modulate the strength and direction of…

The objective of the current study is to contribute to the larger body of sociophonetic variation research by describing and analyzing Spanish as spoken in a small Puerto Rican community in the US. First, I describe phonological and morphosyntactic features of Spanish as used by four different groups of Puerto Rican informants in Amsterdam, New…

This study examined the attitudes of postgraduate biology students of three top-ranked Russian universities towards the foreign accents of non-native English-speaking lecturers. Fifty participants responded to a questionnaire, the main purpose of which was to explore the listeners' perceptions of professors' accents and their influence on…