Sociolinguistic studies have shown that linguistic usage is closely related to social relationships and interactions between individuals. This has been established in adults and adolescents but developmental studies involving children are lacking. This paper studies whether and how peers influence the acquisition of social dialects in young children by using direct observations and quantitative analyses of spontaneous peer interactions and relationships at kindergarten. The longitudinal follow-up of one group of French-speaking children 4 to 5 years of age shows that the individual scores of sociolinguistic variables converge after one year of frequent contact. Moreover, we find that children who interact more frequently adopt similar usage of sociolinguistic variables, whereas other factors have no influence (teacher's speech, child's awareness of standard sociolinguistics norms, reported interpersonal attraction). These results provide the first evidence that social interactions within the peer group do have an influence on children's linguistic usage through daily interactions at an early age.

This study provides evidence of grammatical complexification, operationalized as the emergence of a significant linguistic constraint on the use of a linguistic structure, in Spanish spoken in New York City. Analyses of 4276 third-person singular verbs produced in sociolinguistic interviews with first-generation Latin American immigrants and second-generation US-born Latinos demonstrate that third-person singular subject pronoun expression (ella canta ~ canta ‘she sings ~ sings’) is constrained by tense/mood/aspect in the second generation, but not the first. Further analysis shows that this effect reflects a strategy aimed at clear referent identification. I conclude by suggesting that the increase in attention to ambiguous verb morphology, that is, the complexification, is related to other, concomitant changes in pronoun expression patterns in Spanish in New York City.

Variable agreement in Brazilian Portuguese is subject to social stigma. It was brought to the general public's attention in 2011 in a heated nationwide sociolinguistic debate triggered by TV Globo, the principal network. In order to isolate objective factors underlying this debate, we examine the variable education in a trend study of Rio de Janeiro speech. Relying on logistic model relative weights and their corresponding ranges, we use polarization to designate the magnitude of these ranges. Polarization of the education variable in 1980 was moderate, whereas in 2000, polarization becomes extreme in an increasingly uneven social distribution of standard marked forms. The increased effect of education is also reflected in a comparison with the statistical effect of mass media: in 1980, media contact had a stronger effect than education did, whereas in 2000, education exhibits a stronger effect. The results reveal objective correlates to speakers' subjective reactions, suggesting that public discussion of linguistic prejudice would be useful to the community, which can profit from results of sociolinguistic research in a humanistic and emancipatory way, as foreseen by Sankoff (1988a).

This study examines cross-generational differences in the realization of an English phonological contrast by bilingual Polish Americans in New York City. I analyze the production of voice onset time (VOT) in underlying stops, as in tin and den, and stops derived from interdental fricatives, as in [t]in for thin and [d]en for then, in an English-only reading task. Generation one exhibits VOT “interference” for both stop types, with a bias toward interference for voiced stops. Generation two “transfers” Polish-like VOTs to derived stops. I argue that the cross-generational progression from the global effects of interference to the focused presence of transfer is filtered through L1 markedness and reflects speakers' growing sensitivity to L2 phonology and social considerations. The observed asymmetries in the distribution of interference/transfer are unaccountable by existing models of L2 acquisition and motivate a view of L1/L2 phonetic categories as governed by a variable grammar with access to phonological and social information.

When we interact with one another, we tend to align our behaviors, including the way we talk. Psycholinguistic work has conceptualized alignment as the result of automatic cognitive mechanisms that operate to facilitate processing and communication. Sociolinguistic work has focused on the role of social identity and interactional strategy in explaining linguistic alignment. We draw on these two largely distinct traditions to investigate socially mediated syntactic alignment with the goal of understanding how social perception and cognition influence the mechanisms involved in alignment. A novel web-based paradigm was employed to collect speech data from a large socially heterogeneous sample. Participants listened to one of three speakers, each with a different accent, deliver an ideologically charged diatribe. Participants then completed a picture description task to assess the degree of syntactic alignment. Finally, participants completed a comprehensive social questionnaire designed to assess a wide range of social dimensions, which were tested as predictors of alignment. Our results suggest that syntactic alignment is to some extent automatic, but socially mediated. We found an overall alignment effect across social conditions and independent of social perceptions. However, the degree of alignment was influenced by a number of factors, including the perceived standardness of the passage speaker's accent, participants' perceived similarity to the speaker, and participants' preference for compromise as a conflict management style. These findings are discussed in terms of theories of linguistic alignment and speech production.