Children’s Linguistic Repertoires Across Dialect and Standard Speech: Mirroring Input or Co-constructing Sociolinguistic Identities?

Figures & data

Table 1. Participants

		Location		Gender		Main variety of German at home^a			Mono-/Bilingualism		Maternal education (SES)^b
		Rural	Urban	Male	Female	Dialect	“Umgangssprache” or Standard German	Various	Mono-lingual	Bilingual	Low	High
Age group	3 yrs. (n = 7)	5	2	2	5	2	4	1	5	2	5	2
	4 yrs. (n = 16)	6	10	8	8	6	4	6	11	5	8	7
	5 yrs. (n = 19)	7	12	12	7	5	8	5	13	6	15	4
	6 yrs. (n = 7)	1	6	4	3	3	3	1	4	3	5	2
Location	Rural			8	11	5	7	7	17	2	10	9
	Urban			18	12	11	12	6	16	14	23	6
Gender	Male					11	10	4	16	10	19	7
	Female					5	9	9	17	6	14	8
Main variety ofGerman at home	Dialect								13	3	12	4
	“Umgangssprache” or Standard German								12	7	13	6
	Various								8	5	7	5
Mono-/Bilingualism	Monolingual										20	13
	Bilingual										13	2
Total (n = 49)		19 (38.8%)	30 (61.2%)	26 (53.1%)	23 (46.9%)	16 (32.7%)	19 (38.8%)	13 (26.5%)	33 (67.3%)	16 (32.7%)	33 (67.3%)	15 (30.6%)

^aData were missing from one child.

^bData were missing from one child.

Table 2. Mean proportions of TCUs per variety in each situation

Situation	Mean percentage of dialect TCUs (standard deviation)^a	Mean percentage of standard TCUs (SD)	Mean percentage of mixed/intermediate TCUs (SD)	Total TCUs (including ambiguous TCUs)
‘Memory‘ with standard German speaker	48.2% (26.4)	38.4% (26.2)	13.4% (11.1)	587
‘Memory‘ with dialect speaker	60.1% (26.4)	27.5% (26.1)	12.4% (7.2)	925
Story-retelling to standard German speaker	28.2% (24.3)	57.9% (29.2)	14.0% (12.1)	697
Story-retelling to dialect speaker	46.8% (23.8)	32.2% (28.8)	20.9% (15.0)	381
Pretend play	22.1% (22.4)	66.3% (28.8)	11.7% (9.1)	1357

^aOnly includes children with at least 10 TCUs in the respective conversation. Proportions were calculated for each child individually (without ambivalent TCUs) and then averaged across all children. In this way, differences in the number of individual TCUs per conversation do not skew the overall pattern.

Table 3. Observable dialect-standard repertoires

Observable type of repertoire
Both standard-near and dialectal (bi-varietal)	Dialectal only	Standard-near only	Intermediate only	Total
25 (51.0%)	9 (18.3%)	14 (28.5%)	1 (2.0%)	49 (100%)

Figure 1. Bivariate relationships between background variables and repertoire.

Table 4. Predictors´ unique contributions in the multinomial logistic regression (full model)

Predictor	Likelihood-ratio tests
	χ^2	df	p
Constant	.000	0	.
Location (rural/urban)	8.465	2	.015*
Gender	7.573	2	.023*
Bi-/monolingualism	8.521	2	.014*
Maternal education	1.189	2	.552
Frequency of being read to	8.248	2	.016*
Main variety at home	1.923	4	.750
Age	6.038	2	.049*

χ² = Amount by which −2 log likelihood increases when predictor is removed from the full model.

Figure 2. Repertoire by location and gender.

Figure 3. Repertoire by location and frequency of being read to.

Figure 4. Repertoire by age, gender and location.