This project focuses on the phonetic and phonological development of 40 children ages 2-4, from the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1 ESV builds upon the findings of an earlier project, which we refer to as PVC. 2 PVC yielded a detailed record of variation and change among an adult community in Newcastle upon Tyne, showing correlations between various linguistic forms and speech style, gender, class, and age. The project furthermore attempted to integrate methods and theories from variationist sociolinguistics with those of contemporary phonological theory and of acoustic phonetics. In light of the findings of PVC, we are seeking to understand how children acquire complex patterns of structured phonetic variation, including phonetic alternants which are sociolinguistically patterned in the surrounding adult community. In Newcastle English, for example, words of the NURSE lexical set (Wells 1982) may be pronounced with a range of vowel qualities, including [o:] and [flJ:]. The former variant is used almost exclusively by males, while the latter is significantly more common in the speech of women (Watt and Milroy 1999, Watt 2000).

Variable features of this kind have received little attention in the literature on child language acquisition. In part this is the result of methodological constraints: most child studies have involved diary-based documentation of the productions of individual children, in contrast with the large samples necessary to locate sociolinguistic variation.