Growing up in multilectal and multilingual Netherlands: The acquisition of sound variation by primary school children

Project dates

01.12.2023 - 30.11.2024

Project summary
Children acquire language primarily from their caregivers, but we know that - at some point - the role of peers becomes crucial for their language development. Both at home and at school, the number of children involved in a heterogenous language situation is growing, because they hear different varieties of the majority language (e.g., dialects, regiolects, etc.) (multilectalism) and different unrelated languages (due to growing multilingualism). We know that infants in the very first years of their lives narrow down their attention to the characteristics specific to their own language variety (i.e., the one produced by their caregivers). It is only at the adolescence that they master speech styles, code-switching, and language variation in an adult-like fashion.

This project aims to investigate the period between these developmental phases and addresses the question how do the production and the perception of sound variation develop over time in primary school children in a multilectal and multilingual society. 

• To investigate how sound variation in the production of Dutch develop, we conduct phonetic measurements in the speech of 5-to 8 years old children in two longitudinal corpora of recordings (Boerma et al., 2016 & Bosma et al., 2017). 
• To investigate the evolution of children’s attitudes towards sound variation, we conduct an attitude experiment in a cross-sectional study involving 4-to 8 years old in two regions and try to reveal which sound features they consider “best” in a particular context.

This project contributes to the upcoming field of developmental sociolinguistics, revealing the evolution in children’s acquisition of language variation and its social meaning.

 
Data & privacy 
For the current project (part I) we use the semi-spontaneous speech data (MAIN) from the NWO-funded CoDEmBi project (Cognitive development in the context of emerging bilingualism, PI. Prof. Dr. Elma Blom) and the project on Cognitive effects and the character of Frisian-Dutch bilingualism (Campus Fryslan, Dr. Evelyn Bosma). These recordings have been made starting in 2013 with children between the ages of 5 and 8 to investigate the development of language, memory and attention. In the current project the recordings are reused anonymously (i.e. without identifying information) to investigate the development of pronunciation variation. More information in our privacy statement (here: Privacyverklaring [in Dutch]).
 
We are very grateful to Prof. Dr. Elma Blom, Dr. Tessel Boerma and Dr. Evelyn Bosma for making the recordings available for the current project.
 
Team
PI: dr. Anne-France Pinget (a.c.h.Pinget@uu.nl) 
Research assistants: Roos Ledeboer and Estée Lindhout