Child Participation in Linguistic Changes in Progress in Ontario English

This dissertation investigates how children participate in language changes in progress in their community, focusing on two variables: one vowel change, /u/-fronting, and one morphosyntactic change, the genitive alternation between ’s and of. Previous studies suggest two ways that children may contribute to change: through early language learning errors, such as overgeneralization, or through socially-driven incrementation of changes in progress later in childhood. To explore both processes, this study includes children ages 4 to 12 and compares their productions with those of adults. Experiment 1 examines /u/-fronting, a phonologically conditioned change in which /u/ is initially more fronted after coronal consonants than in other contexts. From picture naming and word reading tasks, children were found to front /u/ more than adults in the non-coronal environment, and this effect was strongest for the youngest children. This pattern suggests a kind of overgeneralization of /u/-fronting, with young children extending the change to a new environment. Experiment 2 focuses on change in the genitive alternation: the s-genitive is increasing in frequency over time, conditioned by several factors including possessor animacy, type of possession relationship, and possessor/possessum length. In an elicitation task, young children produced ’s significantly more often than adults across contexts, while following the same patterns of internal constraints. This bias towards ’s decreased in the middle group of children, but increased again in 10- to 12-year-olds, potentially reflecting incrementation effects later in childhood. Taken together, these findings suggest that mechanisms of child language acquisition can contribute to both phonological and morphosyntactic change. Although the details differ across variables, young children’s production patterns align with the direction of historical change. Theories of language change should consider not only the contributions of adolescents, but also potential learning tendencies in children that can introduce or advance changes in the system.Ph.D