Highlight Talk - Jennifer Smith on Children and Language Change

Jennifer Smith, Professor of Sociolinguistics at Glasgow University: From imitators to innovators: children and language change.

Language is uniquely human. We are the only species that has the ability to talk about the weather, what we will eat for dinner tonight, why we did not like the film we saw at the weekend. Language is also constantly changing - a granny sounds very different to a grandchild - and children are at the centre in driving language change. How exactly does this happen?

In this talk I examine the speech of children from the north-east of Scotland in the key years of language development: first in preschool (aged 3-4) with their caregivers, and then in preadolescence (12-13) with their peers. In doing so, we can track the dynamics of language change as the children move from imitation in the caregiver-dominated speech of the home to innovation in the community-dominated speech of the wider world.

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