Experience With a Linguistic Variant Affects the Acquisition of Its Sociolinguistic Meaning: An Alien-Language-Learning Experiment
Experience With a Linguistic Variant Affects the Acquisition of Its Sociolinguistic Meaning: An Alien-Language-Learning Experiment
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语言变体的体验影响其社会语言意义的获得：一项外来语言学习实验
DOI：
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Gareth Roberts
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Wei Lai;P. Rácz;Gareth Roberts
说话者如何学习不同语言变体的社会意义，以及什么因素影响特定社会语言联系被学习的可能性？有人认为，更显著的变体的社会意义应该学习得更快，学习者对变体的预先存在的经验会影响其显著程度。在本文中，我们报告了两个人工语言学习实验。每个实验包括两个语言学习阶段，然后是测试。第一阶段引入了人工语言，并对参与者进行了培训，而第二阶段则使用卡通外星人的图像添加了一个简单的社会背景。第一个学习阶段的目的是确定参与者对人工语言的总体经验，特别是对语言变体的分布。第二阶段，语言刺激伴随着特定外星人的形象，旨在模拟社会背景下语言变体的习得。在我们的第一个实验中，我们操纵了在第二个学习阶段中是否遇到了与第二个学习阶段中的一个外星人物种相关的特定语言变体。在第二个实验中，我们操纵了该变体是否在相同的语法语境中遇到。在这两种情况下，我们都预测，新变体的出乎意料或旧变体的新语法语境会增加变体的显着性，并有助于学习其社会意义。这就是我们发现的，尽管在第二个实验中，这种效果是由更好的学习者驱动的。我们的结果表明，出乎意料增加了变体的显着性，使其社会分布更容易学习，从而加深了我们对个人语言经验在获得社会语言学意义中所起作用的理解。
How do speakers learn the social meaning of different linguistic variants, and what factors influence how likely a particular social-linguistic association is to be learned? It has been argued that the social meaning of more salient variants should be learned faster, and that learners' pre-existing experience of a variant will influence its salience. In this paper, we report two artificial-language-learning experiments investigating this. Each experiment involved two language-learning stages followed by a test. The first stage introduced the artificial language and trained participants in it, while the second stage added a simple social context using images of cartoon aliens. The first learning stage was intended to establish participants' experience with the artificial language in general and with the distribution of linguistic variants in particular. The second stage, in which linguistic stimuli were accompanied by images of particular aliens, was intended to simulate the acquisition of linguistic variants in a social context. In our first experiment, we manipulated whether a particular linguistic variant, associated with one species of alien in the second learning phase, had been encountered in the first learning phase. In the second experiment, we manipulated whether the variant had been encountered in the same grammatical context. In both cases we predicted that the unexpectedness of a new variant or a new grammatical context for an old variant would increase the variant's salience and facilitate the learning of its social meaning. This is what we found, although in the second experiment, the effect was driven by better learners. Our results suggest that unexpectedness increases the salience of variants and makes their social distribution easier to learn, deepening our understanding of the role of individual language experience in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning.