ACQUISITION OF PHONOLOGICAL STRUCTURE AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIABLES

This book analyzes the acquisition of soundsthat exhibit sociophonological variation in Spanish.Specifically, this study has analyzed the acquisitionof two variable phonological phenomena in Venezuelanchildren's speech: intervocalic /d/ andsyllable-final /-r/. 30 monolingual Spanish-speaking children wereselected from the corpus Competencia Narrativa deNińos en Edad Escolar (1996). The speakers weredivided into five groups according to age (42-47months, 48-53 months, 54-59 months, 60-65 months, and66-77 months); two groups according to socioeconomicclass (16 lower-class and 14 upper-class speakers);and two groups according to sex (16 male and 14female speakers). The findings of this study demonstrate that, from avery early age, children begin to use variablephonology with a sociolinguistic value that issimilar to that of the adult model. Children acquirefirst the sociolect of their immediate community,but, with regular exposure to other systems, theybegin not only incorporating new repertoires in theirspeech, but also assigning social value to them.