Speech Development in Scottish Children: a comparative study of the influence of local vs. non-local parental dialect on vowel acquisition

Our prospective study will analyse vowel patterns in 40 children living in Scotland's most heavily populated cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh. These are cities with markedly different socioeconomic compositions, and many socially stratified accent features (Stuart-Smith 1999; Chirrey 1999). Half the children will have parents with Scottish accents, and half with parents speaking Southern English accents. Transcriptional and acoustic analyses will be used to examine phonetic features and lexical sets memberships (Wells 1982) expected to differ between these two systems, e.g. monophthongal vs. diphthongal features (FACE and GOAT), potential phonemic contrast (COT vs. CAUGHT), and rhotic vs. non-rhotic pronunciations. We report here pilot work underpinning this research. First, we report on a single case study of a child with mixed Scottish/English input in the home, whose speech patterns indicated the acquisition of a mixed system, in particular with regards to monophthongal vs. diphthongal features. Second, using data from QMU's ULTRAX project, we focus on inter-sibling variation, exemplifying a range of Scottish/English accent mixtures.caslAISEB. 2012. Accent and Identity on the Scottish-English Border. [online] Available at: http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/ Braber, N., and Butterfint, Z. 2008. Local identity and sound change in Glasgow - A pilot study. [online] In: Leeds Working Papers 13, 22-33. Available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/linguistics/WPL/WP2008/2.pdf Chambers, J. K. 1992. Dialect acquisition. Language, 68, 673-705. Chirrey, D. 1999. Edinburgh: descriptive material. In: Foulkes, P. and Docherty, G. eds. Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. Great Britain: Arnold, 223-229. Roberts, J. and Labov, W. 1995. Learning to talk Philadelphian: Acquisition of short a by preschool children. Language Variation and Change, 7, 101-112. Scobbie, James M. 2005. Interspeaker variation among Shetland Islanders as the long term outcome of dialectally varied input: speech production evidence for fine-grained linguistic plasticity. QMU Speech Science Research Centre Working Papers, WP-2. [online] Available at: http://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/140/1/no2.pdf Scobbie, James M. 2006. Flexibility in the face of incompatible English VOT systems. In: Laboratory Phonology 8 - Varieties of Phonological Competence. Phonology and Phonetics 4-2. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 367-392. Smith, J., Durham, M. and Fortune, L. 2007. Mam, ma troosers is fa'in doon!- Community, caregiver and child in the acquisition of variation in Scottish dialect. Language Variation and Change, 19 (1) 63-99. Stuart-Smith, J. 1999. Glasgow: accent and voice quality. In: Foulkes, P. and Docherty, G. eds. Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. Great Britain: Arnold, 203-222. Watson, S. 2009. 'It's a zb_] and a [zib_]...no, a [zb_ ' - phonetic variation in the vowels of a child of 3;1 with parents of differing British English accents. Junior Honours Dissertation, University of Glasgow. Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English 2 - The British Isles. Great Britain: Cambridge University Press. Ultrax: Real Time Tongue Tracking for Speech Therapy. 2013. [online] Available at: http://www.ultrax-speech.org/teampub3526pu