Specific comments on the dialect rating forms were as follows: sounds a little bit Cajun/Creole, some Cajun/Creole flavoring in his/her speech, and some Cajun/Creole features heard. The listeners’ answers to these questions indicated that all of the children were speaking a Louisiana variety of SAAE or SWE however, for 31 of the 93 cases, one or more of the listeners also indicated that they perceived a Cajun/Creole influence within the children’s use of SAAE or SWE. For dialect-specific patterns, the rating form provided them a blank area for writing. To facilitate the raters’ identification of relevant language features, the rating form asked them to check one or more of the following: paralinguistic behaviors including stress and intonation, phonology, morphology and syntax, and vocabulary. For example, the raters were asked to indicate the language features they used to make their dialect judgments, and when possible, to write down dialect-specific patterns of vernacular. Although the earlier publication of this work focused on the children’s use of SAAE or SWE, other information about the excerpts was also collected. The listener judgment task asked three doctoral students in linguistics to independently classify the dialects of 93 children by listening to a 1-min excerpt from each child’s language sample. As background, we review relevant findings from the 2002 listener judgment study and previous findings from adult studies of Cajun/Creole English (CE). By doing this, we also aimed to establish a set of methods that can be used by other researchers who are interested in studying childhood language acquisition and/or impairment within the context of dialect diversity. In the current study, we further examined these data to learn more about the linguistic factors that may have contributed to these results. Although our past research has shown that the dialects within these samples reflect varieties of Southern African American English (SAAE) and Southern White English (SWE), results from an earlier listener judgment study by Oetting and McDonald (2002) also indicated that some of the children sounded a little Cajun and/or Creole to some listeners. The samples were collected from children who lived in a rural area in southeastern Louisiana (for previous studies of these samples, see Oetting, Cantrell, & Horohov, 1999 Oetting & McDonald, 2001, 2002 Ross, Oetting, & Stapleton, 2004 Wynn, Eyles, & Oetting, 2000). An existing dataset of 93 child language samples provided us an opportunity to examine both of these issues. Moreover, missing from the literature is a well-developed framework and set of methods for studying speaker variation as a variable within a single dialect and/or multidialect investigation. Although Louisiana is well known for its linguistic diversity and Cajun/Creole French heritage, very few empirical studies have been completed on the dialects of this state. The current study reflects a first attempt to study some of the language variation that is present in the nonmainstream English dialects of children who live in Louisiana. For the former, /a/ disfavored deletion whereas for the latter, /a/ had the same effect on deletion as other vowels.
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In addition, there were group differences in the linguistic conditioning of the deletion. Speakers under 25 years of age who had less contact with non-AAE speakers were more likely to delete /r/ than those who were older and had more contact. Within this study, rates of /r/-deletion were found to vary as a function of two variables, speaker age and speaker contact with non-AAE speakers. One example of this latter type of influence can be found in Myhill’s (1988) study of AAE /r/-deletion. In other cases, the variation can be tied to one or more variables that systematically influence the language of a subgroup. In some cases, this variation relates to individual differences between speakers (for more discussion of idiolects, see Mufwene, 2001).
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Language use varies across individuals even when these individuals are perceived to speak the same general dialect.