Abstract
Objectives. This study investigated whether preschool and early school age children's friendship choices are modulated by talker's regional dialect, and whether the potential preference for local/native dialect would be attenuated by child's more diverse language experience.
Methods. An online forced-choice experiment was administered.
Each of 12 trials contained a pair of sentences recorded by two different same-sex speakers: one was speaking the Central Bohemian variety of Czech and the other speaking the phonetically distinct Nothern Moravian-Silesian dialect. Data were collected from total 81 participants, aged 5 to 8 years from both regions, who, upon listening to both sentences in each trial, indicated, which of the two children they would like to play with.
Results. A generalized linear mixed-effects model revealed a statistically significant interaction of age and participant location (average estimated effect size = 16.4 %, SE = 8.1 %, z = 2.031, p =.042).
Pairwise comparisons showed that younger Moravian-Silesian children had a stronger preference for their own local dialect than younger Central Bohemian children, and marginally also than the older Moravian-Silesian children. Conclusions.
The results can be explained by considering that older Moravian-Silesian children have a more diverse language experience (associated with starting school), similarly to Central Bohemian children of any age who have a more diverse language experience due to a greater linguistic variation in their region. Such richer, more varied language experience might then attenuate children's preferences for their own dialect.
Limitations. The recruitment procedures for both regions were kept identical in order to recruit comparably motivated participants' parents, which is crucial to collect comparably reliable data using an online experiment administered by the children's parents.
This however resulted in a relatively small sample of the younger group of Moravian-Silesian children. Followup research, ideally lab-based, is needed to test the replicability of the present findings, and to collect more detailed information on children's language, dialectal, and education background.