The role of regional variability in the input on the development of word recognition in toddlers

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Bettina Braun
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 467317876

In Germany, many children grow up with more than one regional variety (for example, Alemannic and a standard variety). However, there are hardly any studies that examine how children with linguistic variability in the input develop lexical representations. These are necessary to recognize words, not only in one variety, but in two varieties. Therefore, many acquisition theories are incomplete. From monolingual growing children (with only one variety in input), it is known that lexical representations are very specific, i.e., words are not recognized if sounds are altered. These children succeed to recognize word forms of an unknown variety of their language only in the second year of life. For bivarietal children, linguistic alternations are the norm and not an experimental condition in the lab, but we do not know what effect the increased variability has, i.e., when one parent says shoe [ʃuː] and the other [ʃu͡ə].This project investigates what kind of lexical representations bivarietal children develop (only one representation, two independent representations, underspecified representations or pre-lexical adaptations). Among others, we recruit children who receive Alemannic regional forms from their parents and standard forms from the media. In Work Package 1, we examine the linguistic variability that these children actually experience by recording and analyzing child-directed utterances and extracting the proportion of dialectal forms they receive. In work packages 2 and 3, we investigate: a) whether children recognize word forms when the variety changes between familiarization and test, b) if children recognize objects irrespective of the variety they are named in and if they can generalize known alternations across varieties to new words, c) how the word representations change over the course of the 2nd and 3rd year of life and d) how the variability in the input affects the word recognition of children. Among others, we will use a custom made app that allows parents to contribute to work packages 1 and 2 from home. This project fills a gap in the acquisition literature and provides data on the first language acquisition and the development of lexical representations in an acquisition group, which is numerically large (in Southern Germany, about 50% of the people speak dialect, in Switzerland Alemannic is the vernacular variety), but which is underrepresented in acquisiton studies. We expect insights on the adequacy of standardized language tests in kindergartens and elementary schools, conclusions on children whose parents speak with a foreign accent and impulses for more appropriate language therapy for children growing up with more than one regional variety.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Canada
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Elizabeth Johnson, Ph.D.
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Katharina Zahner-Ritter