‘Try not to eat the microphone.’
Some questions are only understood as endemic to one's research design in hindsight, such as, ‘what will happen if we outfit twenty-nine preschoolers with lapel mics?’. As with child rearing, there's no dearth of surprises in data collection.
Relatively isolated monoculture Buckie, Scotland is where authors Smith & Durham collected their data, recording the daily speech of (female) caregivers and their children (aged two years ten months to four years two months) in the early 2000s and returning in 2013 to collect baseline data on adult speech. All of the study's subjects speak a Buckie-specific variety of Doric Scots, which offered a wealth of local variants for the authors to investigate.
The authors carve out a space for themselves within the field of childhood language acquisition with the guiding question, ‘when and how do children acquire the highly complex patterns of variation, both linguistic and sociolinguistic, widely attested in adult speech?’ (xiv, 22). Armed with cross-sectional data, the researchers compared the caregiver-child dyads’ speech with that of adult community members across nineteen variants (lexical, lexical-phonological, phonetic, and morphosyntactic). Buckie children ‘follow the well-established developmental patterns found in previous first language acquisition research’, but their dataset allowed the authors to ‘uncover patterns of structured variation at these earliest stages’ (80).
Indeed, while the analysis confirms that caregiver speech is a key input into children's acquisition of community variants—as it with standard forms—the authors go further in their careful consideration of the influence of age, gender, context-dependent style-shifting, and linguistic and social constraints. Caregivers use more standard variants with their younger children, gradually increasing the frequency of local variants as the children age. Caregivers’ relative consciousness of social stigma attached to a given variable factored heavily in their use and their child's subsequent acquisition. Furthermore, the awareness itself is transmitted early on in the process of language acquisition. The authors also uncover a deletion phenomenon in the morphosyntactic variable of do, which they maintain ‘has important implications for other linguistic variables which may exhibit “linguistic zeroes”’ (159).
In the grand tradition of social science, the authors conclude by intoning that it's complicated. Smith & Durham deftly fill a gap in language acquisition research, simultaneously blazing trails for further study. The formerly hidden patterns of variant use ‘can inform more broadly on theories of language structure and how the language faculty is configured in variation’ (148). One particularly interesting thread involves the interplay between language ideology and (local) identity-formation ‘inherent in CDS [child-directed speech] and caregivers’ social evaluation of their role in these crucial years of development’ (195). Ethnographic methods could help clarify why certain lexical-phonological variants are deployed with greater frequency than others in particular CDS contexts.
For scholars interested in language acquisition, local linguistic variation, style shifting, or the idiosyncratic charms of tiny children, Smith & Durham offer an intriguing text for intellectual consumption. But don't eat it.
