The role of social group membership on the acquisition of linguistic variation

Language naturally varies across social groups. For example, in American English, men are more likely than women to pronounce the -ing ending as -in’. Learning these kinds of social patterns, who tends to talk in which ways, is an important part of becoming a competent language user and understanding how people present themselves socially. And ultimately, the variants that we use are part of how we construct our own social identity. Yet we still know little about how children acquire this knowledge. One possibility is that children pay closer attention to the speech of people who are “like them,” and that this social alignment helps them learn the social meaning of linguistic forms. However, it has not been directly tested whether sharing a social group with a speaker actually shapes how children learn when the language input contains variation (e.g., cases where multiple forms serve the same grammatical function). This study tests that idea using a child-friendly artificial language in which plural marking differs between male and female speakers. Children will observe male and female speakers who use different plural endings, and we will ask whether children preferentially learn and use the variant used by speakers who share their gender.