A sociophonetic analysis of rhotic variation in Italian schoolchildren

Abstract

This paper investigates the production of Italian rhotics in the speech of 75 schoolchildren (6-10 years old) in the area of Biella, in the North-West of Italy. As rhotics are subject to a high degree of variation in Italian, their distribution and phonetic realisations were taken into account to test the influence of linguistic and sociolinguistic variables, i.e., phonological context, age and migratory background of the children’s families. Results show that children’s production varies across contexts and ages, as older subjects’ patterns of variation seem to be approaching the distribution and the characteristics that would be expected in the target. Moreover, we propose that the migratory backgrounds and, in particular, the different Heritage Languages present in the children’s repertoires, might be explanatory to the high degree of variability observed, e.g., in subjects of the same age.

Keywords

• Rhotics
• Italian
• sociophonetic variation
• phonological acquisition
• child language
• heritage languages