ACQUISITION OF PHONOLOGICAL STRUCTURE AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIABLES: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF SPANISH CONSONANT WEAKENING IN VENEZUELAN CHILDREN¿S SPEECH

This book analyzes the acquisition of sounds that exhibit sociophonological variation in Spanish. Specifically, this study has analyzed the acquisition of two variable phonological phenomena in Venezuelan children¿s speech: intervocalic /d/ and syllable-final /-r/. 30 monolingual Spanish-speaking children were selected from the corpus Competencia Narrativa de Niños en Edad Escolar (1996). The speakers were divided into five groups according to age (42-47 months, 48-53 months, 54-59 months, 60-65 months, and 66-77 months); two groups according to socioeconomic class (16 lower-class and 14 upper-class speakers); and two groups according to sex (16 male and 14 female speakers). The findings of this study demonstrate that, from a very early age, children begin to use variable phonology with a sociolinguistic value that is similar to that of the adult model. Children acquire first the sociolect of their immediate community, but, with regular exposure to other systems, they begin not only incorporating new repertoires in their speech, but also assigning social value to them.