Expectation through imitation: towards a unified protocol for roleplay in developmental sociolinguistics

Roleplay, as a form of speaker imitation, has commonly been used as a tool to investigate the emergence of sociolinguistic expectations in children. In this paper, we integrate previous methodological insights on roleplay with the aim to draft a unified protocol for its design and analysis in (developmental) (socio)linguistics. Special attention is paid to guiding principles for (1) role selection, (2) roleplay elicitation, (3) roleplay identification, (4) isolation of the linguistic variable and (5) cross-verification of the results. The roleplay protocol is applied to a case study on English insertions in Belgian Dutch by five preadolescents, where it seems to effectively capture sociolinguistic expectations: respondents increasingly insert English elements in their performances of English-oriented roles (e.g. rapper) and limit those elements in their performances of Dutch-oriented roles (e.g. farmer). Overall, this paper unites previous insights on the implementation of roleplay designs, aiming to further empirical investigations into speaker imitation in developmental sociolinguistics and the study of linguistic behavior in roleplay in general.