The phonetic realisation of the first-person singular possessive form my is highly variable, as observed by Hollmann and Siewierska (2007) in their account of the feature in Lancashire and Snell (2008, 2010) in her sociolinguistic study of Teesside school children’s speech. This paper presents an investigation into the phonetic variability of the possessive singular in a different variety, Tyne...

Explaining how children infer grammatical rules based on their limited finite experience is central to the hypothesis of universal grammar—that collection of inductive principles which allows learning to happen. Because children and languages are complex and many factors influence acquisition—physiological, sociolinguistic, articulatory, perceptual, phonological, syntactic, semantic—a simpler q...

This investigation compares dialect use by African American children differing in socioeconomic status (SES) and gender. Subjects were 5- and 6-year-old boys (n = 30) and girls (n = 36), who were kindergartners attending schools in the Metropolitan Detroit area. Comparisons of the amount of dialect in the children's spontaneous discourse revealed systematic differences relative to SES and gende...

Pragmatic competence includes illocutionary competence, and sociolinguistic competence. Illocutionary competence indicates a speaker's ability to combine grammatical interpretation of an utterance with its speech act, and the sociolinguistic competence indicates a speaker's ability to perform language functions in appropriate ways according to context. One must gain pragmatic knowledge before b...

Languages exhibit sociolinguistic variation, such that adult native speakers condition the usage of linguistic variants on social context, gender, and ethnicity, among other cues. While the existence of this kind of socially conditioned variation is well-established, less is known about how it is acquired. Studies of naturalistic language use by children provide various examples where children'...

Adolescent peaks have been observed across a range of different types of language change (Labov 2001, Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2009). However, while Labov (2001) finds that peaks are only present in the gender leading the change in phonetic variables, Tagliamonte and D’Arcy (2009) find no gender asymmetry in morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic changes. This paper contributes to this issue thr...

In this article we present a methodology for classification of text from web authors, using sociolinguistic inspired text features. The proposed methodology uses a baseline text mining based feature set, which is combined with text features that quantify results from theoretical and sociolinguistic studies. Two combination approaches were evaluated and the evaluation results indicated a signifi...

a r t i c l e i n f o Low male voice pitch may communicate potential benefits for offspring in the form of heritable health and/or dominance, whereas access to resources may be indicated by correlates of socioeconomic status, such as sociolinguistic features. Here, we examine if voice pitch and social dialect influence women's perceptions of men's socioeconomic status and attractiveness. In Stu...