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Adult processing of other-accented speech is fast, dependent on lexical access, and readily generalizable to new words. But what does children's processing of other-accented speech look like? Although many acquisition researchers have emphasized how other-accented speech presents a formidable challenge to young children, we argue that the field has perhaps underestimated children's early accent processing abilities. In support of this view, we present evidence that 2-year-olds’ accent processing abilities appear to be in many respects adult-like, and discuss the growing literature on children's ability to cope with multi-accent input in the natural world. We outline different theoretical outlooks on the transition children make from infancy to later childhood, and discuss how the growing sophistication of infants’ accent processing abilities feeds into their social perception of the world (and perhaps vice versa). We also argue that efficient processing and meaningful interpretation of accent variation are fundamental to human cognition, and that early proficiency with accent variation (along with all of the implied representational and learning capacities) is difficult to explain without assuming the early emergence of abstract speech representations.

This project studies the development of socially meaningful language variation in (pre)adolescents with Down Syndrome (hence ‘DS’). ‘Socially meaningful language variation’ can be observed when two or more variants denote the same concept, but each of these variants conveys different social meaning about the speaker, the hearer, and the setting in which the variant occurs (Labov, 1972). To illustrate, a Belgian Dutch (hence ‘BD’) speaker might prefer to address their doctor with the variant ‘u’ rather than the variants ‘je’ or ‘ge’ because they consider it the most appropriate in the formal context of a doctor’s visit. Such BD pronouns of address (including ‘u’, ‘je’, and ‘ge’) are employed as a case study in this project, since they show socially meaningful language variation on two dimensions: On the first dimension, they range from more to less formal, and on the second dimension, they range from standard to colloquial (Plevoets et al., 2008). To obtain the best view into how the development of socially meaningful language variation is related to social functioning (e.g., socially engaging with others) and language processing (e.g., using certain grammatical structures while talking), the participants of this project are (pre)adolescents with DS. This is due to these individuals’ unique developmental profile: They have strengths in social functioning on the one hand (Næss et al., 2017), and challenges with language processing on the other (Abbeduto et al., 2020). Overall, this project aims to recruit 32 dyads, each consisting of a (pre)adolescent with DS and their caregiver. It will investigate (a) how (pre)adolescents with DS vary in their productions of Belgian Dutch pronouns of address (via spontaneous language samples and a “discourse completion” experiment where they complete utterances), (b) how they vary in their evaluations of Belgian Dutch pronouns of address (via a “speaker evaluation” experiment where they express their attitude towards ‘u’/’je’/ ‘gij’ use in specific contexts and utterances), (c) the role of the caregiver in their productions and evaluations, and (d) how the participants reflect upon the results specific to their dyad, via a semi-structured interview. In line with the United Nation’s slogan “Nothing about us without us”, the project employs a participatory research framework by including a focus group of (pre)adolescents with DS and their caregiver, a consultation board of persons professionally or privately involved with individuals with DS outside academia, and by involving the participants in the co-analysis of their results. The results are correlated with several measures of language processing and social functioning in the (pre)adolescents with DS to map out the development of socially meaningful language variation. This project contributes to our understanding of the social meaning in language and advances current knowledge in developmental sociolinguistics by adding a unique perspective to the discipline. Literature Abbeduto, L., Arias-Trejo, N., Thurman, A. J., Ramos-Sanchez, J., & del Hoyo Soriano, L. (2020). Language Development in Down Syndrome. In J. A. Burack, J. O. Edgin, & L. Abbeduto (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Down Syndrome and Development. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190645441.013.18 Fidler, D. J., Most, D. E., Booth-LaForce, C., & Kelly, J. F. (2008). Emerging Social Strengths in Young Children With Down Syndrome. Infants & Young Children, 21(3), 207–220. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.IYC.0000324550.39446.1f Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns (11. print). Blackwell. Næss, K.-A. B., Nygaard, E., Ostad, J., Dolva, A.-S., & Lyster, S.-A. H. (2017). The profile of social functioning in children with Down syndrome. Disability and Rehabilitation, 39(13), 1320–1331. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2016.1194901 Plevoets, K., Speelman, D., & Geeraerts, D. (2008). The distribution of T/V pronouns in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch. In K. P. Schneider & A. Barron (Eds.), Variational pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages (pp. 181–210). John Benjamins.

Background. By including individuals with atypical developmental profiles, this study adds to ongoing research that addresses the link between world and mind in (pre)adolescents’ acquisition of socially meaningful language variation (Nardy, Chevrot & Barbu 2013; Smith, Durham & Richards 2013; Van De Mieroop, Zenner & Marzo 2016). In particular, it harnesses the developmental profile of (pre)adolescents with Down Syndrome (DS) for a case study on Belgian Dutch pronouns of address. With strengths in social functioning on the one hand (Fidler et al. 2008; Næss et al. 2017) and challenges with language production on the other (see Abbeduto et al. 2020), these (pre)adolescents and their language use can provide unique insights into how social functioning and language production relate to the development of socially meaningful language variation. We attempt this here through a case study on Belgian Dutch pronouns of address; their two dimensions of socially meaningful variation (formal/informal and standard/colloquial) with patterned yet fuzzy distinctions require a speaker’s highly sophisticated sensitivity (Plevoets, Speelman & Geeraerts 2008). Research question. Against this background, the main question addressed in this study is to what extent (pre)adolescents with DS show variation in the production of Belgian Dutch pronouns of address, with special attention to the social context in question (i.e., the degree of formality and familiarity in the composition of speaker, hearer, and situation) and the degree of prior conceptual activation by priming. The attested variation is interpreted drawing from (pre)adolescents’ social functioning, language production, and their caregiver’s input. Method. As a proof of concept, four dyads consisting of (pre)adolescents with DS and their main caregiver take part in a discourse completion task in which stimuli depicting varied social contexts are aimed at eliciting Belgian Dutch pronouns of address. To assess the full linguistic repertoire, three phases with increasing degrees of priming are integrated. To illustrate, a phase 1 stimulus includes Wat zegt de man tegen de dokter? [‘What does the man say to the doctor?’]. In phase 2, this query is preceded by the sentence De man zegt: ‘ge moet me helpen’ [‘The man says: ‘you have to help me’]. Finally, phase 3 additionally introduces forced choice via predefined answer options, e.g., Kun(t) (u/je/gij) iets aan mijn buikpijn doen? [‘Can you do something about my stomachache?’]. The (pre)adolescents with DS’ social functioning and general language production are measured via well-established diagnostic assessments, and the role of the input is evaluated through a direct comparison of the caregiver’s responses with their child’s on the same task. Results are analyzed and compared per dyad using multifactorial statistics. Findings and implications. Through the innovations of including (pre)adolescents with DS as an understudied community and directly comparing their pronoun use to their caregivers’, this study overall contributes to disentangling how the link between social functioning, language production, and input is reflected in the development of socially meaningful language variation.

BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS | This paper investigates the extent to which beliefs about the language use of speaker groups are shared within a speech community. Concretely, we experimentally uncover which speaker groups are associated with the use of a contact-induced lexical variable, namely the use English loanwords compared to native Dutch alternatives. The paper focuses on three research questions: (1) do language users have shared expectations about the use of English words in Dutch by different speaker age groups; (2) are there shared beliefs regarding the use of English by language users in different social roles (e.g. grandparent, mayor, TV personality); (3) does (unexpected) use of English by projected social role actors lead to negative evaluations? We answer these questions in a bid to better understand the link between language regards and linguistic change (Preston 2011), and the socio-cognitive processes that imbue linguistic variation with social meanings (Drager & Kirtley 2016). METHODOLOGY | Data was collected through a survey reaching 177 Belgian Dutch speakers. They reported their expectations on the use of English loanwords in a four tiered questionnaire targeting (1) expectations about English use for different age groups, (2) expectations about English use for different social roles, and (3) evaluations of that usage by various social roles through 7 point Likert scales, followed by (4) a basic demographic questionnaire collecting information on age, gender identity and language background. RESULTS | Results reveal shared expectations regarding the use of English loans by age, with a perceived peak in late adolescence carried through to early adulthood (see Fig. 1). Regarding the use of English by social role actors, factor analyses suggest three types of social roles with different perceived use of English loans: high use of English loans is associated with modern roles (e.g. rapper, gamer), whilst public (e.g. primary school teacher) and traditional roles’ (e.g. farmer) are perceivedto use significantly less English in their Dutch. Finally, our results indicate that role violation (i.e. use of English loans by groups who are perceived to use them infrequently) only seems to trigger negative evaluations when the role actor is a public figure with social responsibility (e.g. mayor). IMPLICATIONS | The discussion reflects on the implications of the results in two respects. First, we interpret results against the background of the tension between age grading (Labov 1994: 84; Eckert 1997) and incrementation (Labov 2001: 455) suggesting that different age groups tend to use different types of English loanwords: English exclamatives (e.g. what the hell) function as a youth language marker, while slightly older users tend to use English as jargon (e.g. bandwidth). Second, we consider the question of the origin of language regard contrasting the top-down or bottom-up emergence of shared beliefs on speaker groups and linguistic variations more broadly (Docherty and Foulkes 2014; Drager & Kirtley 2016). References Docherty, Gerard J. & Paul Foulkes. 2014. An evaluation of usage-based approaches to the modelling of sociophonetic variability. Lingua 142. 42-56. Drager, Katie, & Joelle M. Kirtley. 2016. Awareness, Salience, and Stereotypes in Exemplar Based Models of Speech Production and Perception. In Anna M. Babel (ed .), Awareness and control in sociolinguistic research, 1-24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, Penelope. 1997. Age as a Sociolinguistic Variable. In Florian Coulmas (ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 151-167. Oxford: Blackwell. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1. Malden: Blackwell. Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2. Malden: Blackwell. Preston, Dennis R. 2011. The power of language regard — discrimination, classification, comprehension, & production. Dialectologia [Special Issue II], 9–33.

Word meaning is layered and multifaceted, imbued not just with semantic content (features and referential characteristics), but also with social meaning and cultural orientation. The present study is part of a three-year sociolinguistics research program, comprising four experiments (this being the first), whose broad aim is to study the acquisition of sociolinguistic meanings in language contact situations. In this talk, we report findings from a picture-naming task, using a combination of pictures: 197 pictures from a normed dataset, Multipic Dataset (Duñabeitia et al., 2018) (obtained with permission) and 47 pictures (the New Zealand Picture Dataset), which we commissioned in order to represent concepts which NZ English (NZE) frequently borrows words from te reo Māori (e.g, kete, hongi, kura). The NZ Picture Dataset includes loanwords from various semantic categories: flora and fauna, kinship terms, physical objects. Using online survey software, we conducted a picture naming task in which 50 participants (undergraduate psychology students) were shown a set of pictures and asked to name the word they would use to describe each picture. Each participant also filled in a background questionnaire, which was used to construct a Māori orientation index (for each participant). The results from this experiment were used to answer the following three research questions: 1. To what extent are NZE speaking respondents with a higher Māori orientation index more likely to select Māori loanwords when naming pictures depicting concepts that can be lexicalized by a listed Māori word in NZE and how does this compare with differences in naming agreement between the respondents for concepts that cannot be lexicalized by a Māori word in NZE? 2. To what extent is naming agreement lower for Māori concepts rather than for a control group of concepts that do not have a listed Māori loanword alternative? 3. To what extent do we find variation in the answers to RQ1 and RQ2 depending on the semantic field to which the concept belongs (fauna and flora, kinship words etc.)? In addition to answering the questions above, the findings arising in this work will be used in two ways. First, the NZ Picture Dataset will be made freely available for NZ schools and language researchers (see Haitana et al., 2010 for discussion of need for such materials). Secondly, the findings will inform our next set of experiments, in which we plan to test the passive knowledge of common Māori loanwords of kiwi mainstream, primary-aged children and probe their general associations with these. References Duñabeitia, J.A., Crepaldi, D., Meyer, S.A., New, B., Pliatsika, C., Smolka, E., & Brysbaert, M. (2018). MultiPic: A standard set of 750 drawings with norms for six European languages. Quarterly Journal for Experimental Psychology, 71(4), 808–816. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1310261 Haitana, T., Pitama, S., & Rucklidge, J. J. (2010). Cultural biases in the Peabody picture vocabulary test-III: testing tamariki in a New Zealand sample. New Zealand Journal of Psychology, 39(3), 24–34.

Background: The past decade witnessed a socio-pragmatic turn in research on the lexical influence of English on Western European languages, prioritizing the social meaning of English influence over their structural integration in the receptor language (Peterson & Beers-Fägerten 2017, Zenner et al. 2019). Missing so far is attention for the role of children as potential leaders in the global proliferation of English (compare Berns, 2007). Aim: This study aims to contribute to this developmental perspective (see De Vogelaer & Katerbow 2017) by experimentally investigating variation in Belgian Dutch elementary school children’s preference for English- or Dutch-sounding neologisms for a series of new objects. Respondents: 120 monolingual children from the same dialect area are included, in a sample balanced for gender and age (including 8-9, 10-11 and 12-13 year olds). Design: The experiment introduces children to 12 new concepts belonging to 3 different semantic fields. Two alternative names are presented to the child for each concept, viz. phonotactically similar artificial neologisms (compare Samara et al. 2017) which can be pronounced in a Dutch or English way (e.g. ‘snaster’, Dutch [snɑstər] vs. English [snɑːstə]). Children are asked to indicate which of the two alternative names they prefer for the object. Two post-tests are included: (1) a categorization task verifies children’s awareness of the language manipulation; (2) a short direct questionnaire charts children’s attitude towards English. Explaining the variation: Multifactorial analyses uncover the complex interplay between lexical preference (dependent variable) and semantic field of the concept, age, gender, awareness and reported attitudes (independent variables). In all, the results allow us to track the evolution in children’s positioning towards English and Dutch as available lexical resources in their community.

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