What happens when a child is exposed to multiple phonological systems while they are acquiring language? How do they resolve contradictory patterns in the accents around them in their own developing speech production? Do they acquire the accent of the local community, their parents’ accent, or something in between? This thesis examines the acquisition of a subset of vowels in a child growing up in a multidialectal environment. The child’s realisations of vowels in the lexical sets STRUT, FOOT, START, PALM and BATH are analysed between the ages of 2;01 and 6;11. Previous research has shown that while a child’s accent is usually heavily influenced by their peers, having parents from outside the local area can prevent complete acquisition of an accent. Local cultural values, whether or not a parent’s accent has more prestigious elements than the local one, a child’s personality, and the complexity of the relationship between the home and local phonological systems have all been implicated in whether or not a child fully acquires a local accent. In the child studied here, a shift from the vowels used at home to local variants always happened at the level of articulatory feature, rather than at phonemic level, in the first instance, and vowels belonging to different lexical sets were acquired at different rates. This thesis demonstrates that acquisition of these vowels takes many years, as combinations of articulatory features stabilise. Moreover, even once a local variant has apparently been acquired, the variety of language spoken at home can leave a phonetic legacy in a child’s accent. Naturalistic data collection combined with impressionistic and acoustic analysis in conjunction with a long and sustained data collection period reveals patterns in this child’s phonological acquisition not seen in any previous research in this detail
