Lexical preference in second dialect acquisition in a second language

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: How does second dialect acquisition in a second language compare to that in a first language in terms of rates and predictors of second dialect vocabulary use? Design/methodology/approach: A lexical preference task was completed by four groups of participants residing in Australia: first language speakers of Australian (L1D1) and American (L1D2) English, and first language speakers of Russian who acquired Australian (L2D1) and American (L2D2) English first. The participants named objects which are denoted by different words in American and Australian English (e.g. bell pepper vs capsicum). Data and analysis: The response was coded as either American or Australian, and percentage of use of Australian items was calculated for each group. Findings/conclusions: L1D1 used Australian words the most and L1D2 the least. L2D1 and L2D2 fell between the two L1 groups. L1D2 rate of use was predicted by proportion of life spent in Australia. L2D1 were more likely to choose Australian words if they had lived in Australia longer and had positive attitudes toward Australia. L2D2 were less likely to use Australian words the longer they had lived in the USA. Similar, but not identical, factors predict second dialect acquisition in the first and second languages. Originality: The research is innovative in considering second dialect acquisition in second language speakers and creates a bridge between second language and second dialect acquisition research. Significance/implications: The finding that second language speakers may be more flexible in second dialect acquisition than first language speakers has important implications for our understanding of cognitive and social constraints on acquisition.

How long is ‘a long term’ for sound change?

This paper investigates the adoption of ongoing community sound change by individuals by considering it as an instance of second-dialect acquisition. Four ongoing changes in Dutch, all involving the move from one-allophone to two-allophone systems, make this possible: these ongoing diachronic changes are simultaneously a source of synchronic variation between Netherlandic Dutch and Flemish Dutch. The paper investigates the adoption of these differences by sociolinguistic migrants: Flemish-Dutch speakers who migrated to the Netherlands to start their university studies. Participants were tracked over the course of nine months, using a rhyme-decision task and a word-list-reading task. Results show robust differences from Netherlandic-Dutch controls, which do not diminish over the nine months. While longer-term accommodation to these same changes has been found elsewhere, it appears that nine months is not enough time. The implications of these findings for various subfields of linguistics, particularly sound change and second-dialect acquisition, are discussed.

Media and Second Dialect Acquisition

This article addresses the role that different types of media might play in second dialect acquisition. While many scholars agree that broadcast media such as television have little effect on individual speakers’ language use, research across fields (sociolinguistics, second language learning, laboratory phonology, and phonetics) suggests that high levels of engagement could facilitate dialect learning via mediated speech. I will briefly describe the mechanisms underlying acquisition of new dialect features, discuss how these mechanisms might operate when speakers are exposed to speech via specific types of media, and sketch some avenues for future research.

Style dominance: Attention, audience, and the ‘real me’

Social constructivist approaches to style have moved away from the cognitive asymmetry that underpinned Labov's original attention-to-speech model, namely that a first-learned vernacular often has cognitive primacy. This study explores the interplay of cognitive and interactional effects in style variation. It reports on three related dynamics of style variation in one individual—Fareed Zakaria, an Indian-American media personality. First, we see Zakaria's robust English bidialectalism with American and Indian audiences. This strong audience effect is complicated by the second finding, which points to asymmetric style dominance in Zakaria's first-learned Indian style, which he subtly defaults to regardless of audience when his attention is diverted by such tasks as quickly counter-arguing or inserting parenthetical information. The third part of the study relates style dominance to agency: In a reflexive intra-personal process of biographical indexicality, speakers such as Zakaria may exploit their personal style biography and use their dominant variety to perform no-nonsense ‘real me’ stances in interaction. (Audience, attention, style variation, indexicality, repertoire, processing, bidialectalism, second dialect acquisition, speech rate)*

Accuracy and acceptability of second-dialect performance on American television

This article analyses a case of second-dialect performance as an idealised instance of second-dialect acquisition, without mitigating factors such as access, analytical ability and motivation. It focuses on the Australian English and American English speech of three young Australian actors. An acoustic analysis of their short-vowel systems shows that they can successfully adapt to perform in an American English accent, but that their second-dialect system is less stable and more variable than their native system.A foreign-accent rating experiment on the actors’ American English with American English judges shows that the actors on average are thought to sound slightly less American than the native American English-speaker controls. The discrepancy between the acoustic accuracy and listener acceptability may be explained by judges attending to different features from those included in the acoustic study.This study of second-dialect performance shows what is maximally possible in second-dialect acquisition. Given the difference between the two measures of success, studies of second-dialect acquisition would benefit from including subjective measures in addition to acoustic accuracy.