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INTRODUCTION
Today, "face-to-face interactions are taking place on a global scale because of unprecedented geographic mobility" (Chambers 2002:117). This has created a world in which there is vast language and dialect contact. Such situations present exceptional opportunities for study, both from the sociocultural perspective and with regard to the underlying mechanisms and biological organization of language. In this article, we focus on one small part of this burgeoning global laboratory of language at its interface with society: the nature of second dialect acquisition, defined as the process by which people transplanted from one region to another acquire a second dialect of the same language (Chambers 1992:674). Indeed, assimilation to the local speech community is perhaps one of the most important factors in an individual's linguistic development. The obvious place to tap into this phenomenon is the linguistic behavior of young children, because they are "well known to be much more rapid and complete accommodators than adults" (Trudgill 1986:31). People who move into a new community where the same language but a different dialect is spoken must adapt a new set of linguistic rules in order to sound like their peers. However, children appear to be the only sector of the population capable of doing this successfully. How do children do it?
Here we address this question by conducting a large-scale quantitative analysis of three transplanted children over a period of six years. In the second section, we review previous research on children, child language acquisition, child language variation, and second dialect acquisition in order to situate our study. In the third section, we describe our corpus and why it provides an important new perspective on second dialect studies. In the fourth section, we detail our methodology, describing our choice of feature for investigation, coding practice, and details of our approach. In the fifth section, we present our findings, focusing on change in real time, variability, and sociolinguistic influences. Finally, we offer our interpretation of the results and discuss their implications.
PREVIOUS RESEARCH
The vast majority of research on child language acquisition has focused on the regular progression of language development (e.g., Brown 1973, Gleason 1985, Bates et al. 1994) and on the structural properties of language that can be inferred from this process (e.g., Wexler...