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Part of
Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research: Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Edited by Tania Ionin and Matthew Rispoli
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 63] 2019
► pp. 35–58

Children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic variation

| Penn State University

This paper provides a review of past research on children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic variation and the impact that variable input has on the acquisition of grammatical morphology. I describe findings from both corpus studies and experimental studies, focusing primarily on the acquisition of variably produced plural morphology and subject-verb agreement. I make two predictions: (i) variable input impacts the time course of acquisition, such that variably produced morphology takes longer to acquire than non-variably produced morphology. And, (ii) variable input does not impact patterns of acquisition. Regardless of input-type, children pass through the same developmental linguistic stages.

Keywords: variation, sociolinguistics, variable input, dialect, language acquisition, children, Spanish, English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Acquisition of sociolinguistic variation
    • 2.1Methods for examining children’s production of sociolinguistic variation
    • 2.2Some general findings on children’s production of variable forms
  • 3.Acquisition of grammatical morphology when the input is variable
    • 3.1Acquisition of variably produced plural morphology
      • 3.1.1Methods
      • 3.1.2General results
    • 3.2Acquisition of variable agreement marking
  • 4.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.03mil
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