Developing sociolinguistic evaluative competence: the case of French WH- interrogatives

Abstract As children acquire the core rules of their language, they also develop the ability to use it in a sociolinguistically adapted way. Although some works have addressed the production of sociolinguistic variables, few have explored the development of a sociolinguistic evaluative competence in children and their ability to pair linguistic forms and social meanings. With an aged-adapted matched-guise paradigm, we investigate how monolingual children aged between 3 and 11 years old ( N = 136) acquire French WH- interrogatives. The acquisition of the variants available in adult French has often been linked to their syntactic complexity, but the quantitative data we present offer new insights. By comparing the adult and child networks of social representations associated with interrogative variants, we show that some linguistic forms carry social meaning very early on. This is evidence for a more complex picture of the factors weighing on how children may acquire competing syntactic variants.