Language variation is demonstrably affected by accumulated experiences reflecting the consequences of the contexts in which words are most frequently used. Yet, these contextual frequency effects are seldom explored in children’s speech. This study uses a corpus-based approach to investigate how 29 Spanish-speaking children, aged 5–15, realize word-initial Spanish /d/ as a function of accumulated experiences with /d/-initial words in articulatory contexts that promote reduction. Contextual frequency effects are also examined in 12 Spanish-speaking adults from the children’s community. Cumulative experience is estimated as the form’s frequency of occurrence in a specific context that promotes a specific variant. Results reveal contextual frequency effects in both the child and adult data. Moreover, the extent of the contextual frequency effect is comparable across generations.

This paper shows (a) how the concept of the linguistic market can be operationalized as an index to enable its inclusion as a factor in variationist analysis and (b) how this index helps to explain sociolinguistic variation in a diglossic situation. To do this, sociolinguistic interviews were conducted in Swiss Standard German among 16 L1-dialect-speakers aged between 19 and 40 from Biel/Bienne in western Switzerland. Drawing from participants’ self-assessments of the importance of Standard German in their professional life, a linguistic market index (LMI) was created and cross-validated with external assessments. Our variationist analysis considered four phonetic-phonological variables—/k/, /ç/, /aː/, /ɛ-ɛː/—for which typical Swiss variants (i.e., sociolinguistic stereotypes) exist. Findings show that the LMI is crucial for explaining variation in all the variables tested. Other social (i.e., gender and formality of the language production task) and linguistic factors (e.g., phonetic environment) show partial effects as well.

This article investigates patterns of variation in the phonetic shape of High Rising Terminal (HRT) intonation contours on declarative utterances in London English. Previous research has demonstrated that there are two pragmatically distinct meanings for HRTs in London, distributed across different groups of users and conversational contexts. Based on current theories of intonational meaning, we would expect this pragmatic differentiation to correlate with differences in tune shape, given the assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a contour’s meaning and its phonological form. Following the example of prior studies of HRTs in other locations, analyses focus on three phonetic properties: rise excursion size, rise dynamism, and the alignment of the rise onset with the nuclear syllable. Unlike much previous research elsewhere, mixed-model regression analyses demonstrate that pragmatic differences in how HRTs are used in London do not correlate with differences in the phonetic characteristics under investigation. The discussion focuses on how to reconcile this result with theories of intonational meaning, arguing that the findings for London may be due to the relatively recent arrival of HRTs in the variety, and, as a result, the lack of a differentiated field of form–meaning correspondences for the contour in the region.