Abstracts
Abstract
Our study examines the extent to which French immersion students use lax /ɪ/ in the same linguistic context as native speakers of Canadian French. Our results show that the lax variant is vanishingly rare in the speech of immersion students and is used by only a small minority of individuals. This is interpreted as a limitation of French immersion students’ sociolinguistic competence. Within the group of students who do use both variants, we document a positive correlation between female and middle-class students and use of the lax variant and suggest these speakers are generally more sensitive to sociolinguistic variation. A reverse correlation between English cognates and laxing was found. This is taken as evidence that the learning of laxing is lexically mediated.
Keywords:
- laxing,
- sociolinguistics,
- variation
Résumé
Dans cette étude, nous examinons l’emploi de la voyelle relâchée /ɪ/ dans le parler des étudiants inscrits dans un programme d'immersion française et comparons la distribution de cette variante à celle qu'on trouve chez les francophones au Canada. Nos résultats démontrent que les étudiants en immersion n’utilisent la variante relâchée que très rarement. Nous interprétons ce résultat comme une lacune dans la compétence sociolinguistique de ce groupe de locuteurs. Parmi ceux qui utilisent la variante relâchée, nous notons une corrélation positive entre l’emploi de cette variante et les étudiants de sexe féminin, aussi bien que les étudiants de la classe moyenne. Notre interprétation de ce résultat est que ces étudiants sont plus sensibles à la variation sociolinguistique en comparaison avec les autres groupes d’étudiants. Une corrélation inverse se trouve entre les mots pour lesquels il existe une forme similaire en anglais. Cela suggère que l’apprentissage du relâchement passe par l’acquisition lexicale.
Appendices
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