Dec 16
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Cornips:2014
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"Research by Smith et al. (2007, 2009) on the acquisition of variation
in pre-school children with their primary caregivers indicates that
sociolinguistic norms are evident from the earliest stages of language
acquisition (2013:287). Moreover, Smith et al. (2013) show that
caregivers exaggerate the use of standard variants above local ones
with younger children but revert to adult-like norms in their speech
once the children pass the age of initial acquisition." - I think the
paper is stating that local language features are present from early
acquisition but also states that the infant receives more standard
input than local input during early acquisition. Can both things be
true? When do local features start to develop?

It would be interesting to repeat such an experiment in countries like
Luxembourg and Belgium since their languages are somewhere between "a
real language" and "dialect".

Last year studying in the Netherlands some of Dutch professors told
us, that Standard Dutch is very different from the dialects that exist
in Dutch. At the same time, a twofold situation is created in teaching
Dutch to students and children - what grammar should they be taught?
Standard or conversational? After all, language teaching is aimed at
understanding this language, immersion in the language environment,
and not educational grammar. Dutch language teachers' practice has
shown that even educated Dutch people make mistakes and grammatical
dialect shifts. This probably leads to the question of what standard
form should exist in the language.  There is a very contrasting
example of how many dialects were lost in the Soviet Union due to
politics - teachers with a good Moscow education were distributed to
different parts of the country to "work out" the knowledge they had
acquired, and thus the standard Russian language was spread and
dialect variations of the language were lost. At the moment,
communication between two people from different parts of Russia and
the former USSR countries will not present difficulties - their
language will be very similar, even identical for a layman. I suppose,
the situation is different for Dutch citizens nowadays.

What are the differences between monolingual and bilingual children in
bilingual areas? How to clearly understand the conclusions drawn from
the article?

What is meant by horizontal and vertical levelling?

The authors claim that certain lingustic choices of the children
(e.g. the extensive delay and variable use of the derminaters de and
het with neuter nouns) may be due to social identity construction. At
what age do children become aware of the social "weight" of their
output and master? The article suggests an early acquisition of this
metalinguistic knowledge. Does it happen alongside the acquisition of
the feature or later on?

In Table 2 where language choice patterns of participants in Heerlen
are presented, there is a category of 8 out of 30 children who don’t
speak the local dialect even though their immediate family does. This
seems a deliberate option. What might be the cause of it (comment:
This question relates to my first question. Generally my first guess
would be that not using the dialect is an identificatory strategy
related to language ideologies about the prestige of local varieties
but does such explanation fit the young age of the participants?).

Why did bidialectal children perform a lot better than bilingual
children on the vocabulary test?

I'm interested to know the extent to which the variation in the
results in vocabulary/grammar accuracy between bidialectals and
bilinguals is linked to how closely related the second input
dialect/language is to Dutch? For example, most of the bilingual
children had language backgrounds that were not closely related to
Dutch (e.g. Moroccan Arabic). It would be interesting to see a
comparison with a closely related bilingual language pair
(e.g. Dutch-German)

When studying extra and intra linguistic factors together, how do the
authors actually weight the contribution of the different factors to
account for how they interact with each other?