The present study analyses 3-to 6-year-old children's dialect-standard repertoires in an Austrian-Bavarian sociolinguistic setting and investigates how far individual repertoires can be explained by input and sociodemographic factors. Adults' linguistic repertoires in the area typically comprise a certain spectrum on the dialect-standard continuum but individual acquisition processes have hardly been studied yet. We collected language data from 49 children in five different communicative interactions each and analyzed the repertoire each child exhibits. The majority of children could be shown to have a bi-varietal repertoire at their disposal, but there were substantial numbers of children who exhibited either standard-only or dialect-only repertoires. We then examined the relationships between a child's repertoire and potentially relevant input and sociodemographic variables. While language variety use in the home and maternal education did not prove significant predictors of children's repertoires, gender, age, location, bilingualism and frequency of being read to did.
Children in Austria are exposed to a large amount of variation within the German language. Most children grow up with a local dialect, German standard language and 'intermediate' varieties summarized as 'Umgangssprache'. Using an ABX design, this study analyses when Austrian children are able to discriminate native varieties of their L1 German (standard German vs local dialect). The results show children's early ability to register differences and similarities on an across-speaker level when sentences are held constant (i.e. to discriminate translation equivalents in the two varieties) and a later, rather sudden emergence of more abstract categories of the varieties, which encompass different phonological and lexical variables and enable children to match sentences which also differ lexically. In sum, discrimination ability seems to be relatively stable and consistent at the age of 8/9. Other than age, the mother's educational background, language variation at home and the immediate sociolinguistic setting (urban/rural) predict children's discrimination performance.
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