Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:47:53 -0500

From:  GURT[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.BITNET

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



Well said, Dennis Preston!



And a recent thread on the Sign Language Linguistics list concerned

hearing children of deaf parents. According to the studies cited, these

children apparently don't learn to SPEAK from listening to the television.



I thought one of the things we learned from Genie is that children

learn language from *interaction*, not from mere exposure.



I remember as a child asking my cousin in South Carolina why she

talked like that, even though nobody on TV talked like that (i.e.,

everybody on TV spoke (more or less) standard American English). She

insisted that she didn't talk any differently than people on TV -- my

impression at the time was that she was arguing that she couldn't hear

a difference between her dialect and the standard.



Can we infer that you learn your dialect from interaction, not mere

exposure, AND that dialects spoken by people you don't interact with

don't sound like different dialects?



Joan C. Cook

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

gurt[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu