Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Acquisition across the Lifespan

This study is concerned with understanding how learners acquire sociolinguistic variation. It examines the possibility that learners gain entry into socially-conditioned variation by first associating patterns with particular speakers. Adult participants were exposed to a miniature artificial language spoken by two different speakers, each exhibiting a different variable pattern of determiner usage. After exposure, participants were tested to see if they had acquired the speaker-specific pattern