181
Views
0
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Article Commentary

Children’s Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation: A Reply to Commentaries

ORCID Icon &

References

  • Aaron, J. E. (2010). Pushing the envelope: Looking beyond the variable context. Language Variation and Change, 22(1), 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394509990226
  • Adger, D., & Smith, J. (2010). Variation in agreement: A lexical feature-based approach. Lingua, 120(5), 1109–1134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2008.05.007
  • Austin, A. C., Schuler, K. D., Furlong, S., & Newport, E. L. (2022). Learning a language from inconsistent input: Regularization in child and adult learners. Language Learning and Development, 18(3), 249–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1954927
  • Baker, E. (2022). ¡casi te caístes!: Variation in second person singular preterit forms in Spanish Children. Journal of Child Language, 49(6), 1256–1267. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000921000507
  • Baker, E. (Under review). Y luego un tiburón blanco ha abrido la boca: Spanish children’s overregularization of irregular past participles. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics.
  • Beckner, C., Ellis, N. C., Blythe, R., Holland, J., Bybee, J., Ke, J., Christiansen, M. H., Larsen-Freeman, D., & Schoenemann, T. (2009). Language is a complex adaptive system: Position paper. Language Learning, 59(1), 1–26. Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan https://www.unm.edu/~jbybee/downloads/BecknerEtAl2009ComplexAdaptiveSystem.pdf
  • Behrens, H. (2009). Usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition. Linguistics, 47(2), 383–411. https://doi.org/10.1515/LING.2009.014
  • Brown, E. (2015). The role of discourse context frequency in phonological variation: A usage-based approach to bilingual speech production. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(4), 387–406. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006913516042
  • Brown, E., & Shin, N. (2022). Acquisition of cumulative conditioning effects on words: Spanish-speaking children’s [subject pronoun + verb] constructions. First Language, 42(3), 361–382. https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237211067574
  • Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511750526
  • Callen, M., & Miller, K. (2022). Linguistic variation in the acquisition of morphosyntax: Variable object marking in the speech of Mexican children and their caregivers. Language Learning and Development, 18(3), 310–323. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1977133
  • Castilla-Earls, A., Auza, A., Perez-Leroux, A., Fulcher-Rood, K., & Barr, C. (2020). Morphological errors in monolingual Spanish-speaking children with and without developmental language disorders. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 51(2), 270–281. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_LSHSS-19-00022
  • Chevrot, J.-P., Beaud, L., & Varga, R. (2000). Developmental data on a French sociolinguistic variable: Post-consonantal word-final/R/. Language Variation and Change, 12(3), 295–319. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095439450012304X
  • De Houwer, A. (2022). The danger of bilingual–monolingual comparisons in applied psycholinguistic research. Applied Psycholinguistics, 44(3), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1017/S014271642200042X
  • Demuth, K., Machobane, M., & Moloi, F. (2009). Learning how to license null noun-class prefixes in Sesotho. Language, 85(4), 864–883. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0173
  • De Villiers, J., & Johnson, V. (2007). The information in third-person /s/: Acquisition across dialects of American English. Journal of Child Language, 34(1), 133–158. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000906007768
  • Díaz-Campos, M. (2005). The emergence of adult-like command of sociolinguistic variables: A study of consonant weakening in Spanish-speaking children. In Studies in the Acquisition of the Hispanic languages: Papers from the 6th conference on the acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as first and second languages. D. Eddington, (eds.) Cascadilla Press. (pp. 56–65). https://hdl.handle.net/2022/25200
  • Geeslin, K. L., & Gudmestad, A. (2010). An exploration of the range and frequency of occurrence of forms in potentially variable structures in second-language Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32(3), 433–463. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263110000033
  • Gudmestad, A., & Geeslin, K. L. (2021). Overlapping envelopes of variation. The case of lexical noun phrases and subject expression in Spanish. In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of variationist approaches to Spanish (pp. 437–449). Routledge.
  • Guy, G. (2018). Variable grammars: Competence as a statistical abstraction from performance. Constructing theories from data. In N. Shin & D. Erker, (eds.) Questioning theoretical primitives in linguistic inquiry: Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy pp. 45–66. John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.76.04guy
  • Guy, G., & Boyd, S. (1990). The development of a morphological class. Language Variation and Change, 2(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500000235
  • Habib, R. (2017). Parents and their children’s variable language: Is it acquisition or more? Journal of Child Language, 44(3), 628–649. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000916000155
  • Hendricks, A. E., Jackson, C., & Miller, K. (2018). Regularizing unpredictable variation: Evidence from a naturalistic setting. Language Learning and Development, 14(1), 42–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2017.1340842
  • Henry, A. (1995). Belfast English and Standard English: Dialect variation and parameter setting. Oxford University Press.
  • Henry, A. (2016). Acquiring language from variable input: Subject-verb agreement and negative concord in Belfast English. Linguistic Variation, 16(1), 2211–6842. https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.16.1.06hen
  • Holmes-Elliott, S. (2021). Calibrate to innovate: Community age vectors and the real time incrementation of language change. Language in Society, 50(3), 441–474. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404520000834
  • Hudson Kam, C. L. (2019). Reconsidering retrieval effects on adult regularization of inconsistent variation in language. Language Learning and Development, 15(4), 317–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2019.1634575
  • Hudson Kam, C. L., & Chang, A. (2009). Investigating the cause of language regularization in adults: Memory constraints or learning effects? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(3), 815–821. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015097
  • Hudson Kam, C. L., & Newport, E. L. (2005). Regularizing unpredictable variation: The roles of adult and child learners in language formation and change. Language Learning and Development, 1(2), 151–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2005.9684215
  • Kanwit, M., & Teran, V. (2020). Ideas buenas o buenas ideas: Phonological, semantic, and frequency effects on variable adjective ordering in Rioplatense Spanish. Languages, 5(4), 65. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5040065
  • Kovac, C., & Adamson, H. (1980). Variation theory and first language acquisition. In D. Sankoff & H. Cedergren (eds.), Variation omnibus: Current inquiry into language and linguistics (pp. 403–410). Linguistics Research Inc.
  • Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Blackwell.
  • Labov, W. (1989). The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change, 1(1), 85–97. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500000120
  • Labov, W. (1994). Principles of linguistic change: Internal factors. MASS.
  • Lavandera, B. (1978). Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop? Language in Society, 7(2), 171–182. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500005510
  • Lease, S., & Marchesi, M. (2022). A sociophonetic approach to the acquisition of Spanish rhotics in a bilingual community. Proceedings of the Linguistics Society of America, 7(1), 5231. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5231
  • Lease, S., Shin, N., & Bird, E. (2022). Community norms and lexical frequency shape U.S. bilingual children’s subject pronoun expression. Heritage Language Journal, 19(1), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1163/15507076-bja10007
  • Lieven, E. (2016). Usage-based approaches to language development: Where do we go from here? Language and Cognition, 8(3), 346–368. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2016.16
  • Lukyanenko, C., & Miller, K. (2018). Children’s and adult’s processing of variable agreement patterns: Agreement neutralization in English. In A. B. Bertolini & M. J. Kaplan, (eds.)Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 479–492). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Lukyanenko, C., & Miller, K. (2019). Learning the plural from variable input: An eye-tracking study of Chilean children’s plural comprehension. Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech, 1(2), 248–279. https://doi.org/10.1558/jmbs.v1i2.11788
  • Lukyanenko, C., & Miller, K. (2023). Agreeing when to disagree: A corpus analysis of variable agreement in caregiver and child English. Language Variation and Change, 35(1), 29–54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394523000054
  • Maratsos, M. (2000). More overregularizations after all: New data and discussions on Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu. Journal of Child Language, 27(1), 183–212. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000999004067
  • Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., Xu, F., & Clahsen, H. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57(4), 1–178. https://doi.org/10.2307/1166115
  • Maslen, R. J., Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V., & Tomasello, M. A dense corpus study of past tense and plural overregularization in English. (2004). Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research: JSLHR, 47(6), 1319–1333. PMID: 15842013. https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2004/099)
  • Miller, K. (2007). Variable Input and the Acquisition of Plurality in Two Varieties of Spanish. Doctoral Dissertation, Michigan State University.
  • Miller, K. (2012). Not all children agree: Acquisition of agreement when the input is variable. Language Learning and Development, 8(3), 255–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2011.601249
  • Miller, K. (2013). Variable input: What Sarah reveals about non-agreeing don’t and theories of root infinitives. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 20(4), 305–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2013.828061
  • Miller, K. (2014). Assessing plural morphology in children acquiring /s/-leniting dialects of Spanish. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 45(3), 173–184. https://doi.org/10.1044/2014_LSHSS-13-0032
  • Miller, K. (2015). Children’s production of ain’t. In P. Donaher & S. Katz (Eds.), Ain’thology: The history and life of the Taboo word ain’t (pp. 96–112). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  • Miller, K. (2019). Children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. In T. Ionin & M. Rispoli, (eds.) 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 (pp. 35–58). LALD 63, John Benjamins.
  • Miller, K., & Schmitt, C. (2012). Variable input and the acquisition of plural morphology. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 19(3), 223–261. https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2012.685026
  • Newkirk-Turner, B., & Green, L. (2016). Third person singular –s and event marking in child African American English. Linguistic Variation, 16(1), 103–130. https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.16.1.05new
  • Perfors, A. (2012). When do memory limitations lead to regularization? An experimental and computational investigation. Journal of Memory and Language, 67(4), 486–506. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.07.009
  • Poplack, S. (2018). Categories of grammar and categories of speech: When the quest for symmetry meets inherent variability. In N. Shin & D. Erker (Eds.), Questioning theoretical primitives in linguistic inquiry: Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy (pp. 7–34). https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.76.02pop
  • Poplack, S., Walker, J. A., & Malcolmson, R. (2006). An English “like no other”? Language contact and change in Quebec. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 51(2/3), 188–213. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100004060
  • Pulido-Azpiroz, M. (2021). Remapping variable subject position in Spanish intransitives: A proposal for functionally defined categories in motion verbs. Spanish in Context, 18(2), 257–284. https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.19006.pul
  • Radford, A. (1992). The acquisition of the morphosyntax of finite verbs in English. In The acquisition of verb placement: Functional categories and V2 phenomena in language acquisition, J. Meisel, (eds.) Kluwer (pp. 23–62).https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2803-2_2
  • Requena, P. (2015). Direct object clitic placement preferences in Argentine child Spanish [ Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Pennsylvania State University.
  • Requena, P. (2022). Variation versus deviation: Early bilingual acquisition of Spanish differential object marking. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.21001.req
  • Roberts, J. (1997). Acquisition of variable rules: (-t,d) deletion and (ing) production in preschool children. Journal of Child Language, 24(2), 351–372. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000997003073
  • Roeper, T. (1999). Universal bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2(3), 169–186. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728999000310
  • Rothman, J., Bayram, F., DeLuca, V., DiPisa, G., Dunabeitia, J. A., Gharibi, K., Hao, J., Kolb, N., Kubota, M., Kupisch, T., & Laméris, T. (2022). Monolingual comparative normativity in bilingualism research is out of “control”: Arguments and alternatives. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716422000315
  • Samara, A., Smith, K., Brown, H., & Wonnacott, E. (2017). Acquiring variation in an artificial language: Children and adults are sensitive to socially conditioned linguistic variation. Cognitive Pscyhology, 94, 85–114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.02.004
  • Schwab, J., Lew-Williams, C., & Goldberg, A. (2018). When regularization gets it wrong: Children oversimplify language input only in production. Journal of Child Language, 45(5), 1054–1072. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000041
  • Schwenter, S. (2011). Variationist approaches to Spanish Morphosyntax: Internal and external factors. In Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, M. Diaz-Campos, (eds.) Blackwell (pp. 123–147).https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444393446.ch6
  • Shin, N. (2016). Acquiring patterns of morphosyntactic variation: Children’s Spanish subject pronoun expression. Journal of Child Language, 43(4), 914–947. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000915000380
  • Shin, N. (2021). Acquiring constraints on variable morphosyntax: SV-VS word order in child Spanish. In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.), Handbook of variationist approaches to Spanish (pp. 425–436). Routledge.
  • Shin, N. (2022b). Structured variation in child heritage speakers’ grammars. Language and Linguistic Compass, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12480
  • Shin, N. L. (2021). Testing interface and frequency hypotheses: Bilingual children’s acquisition of Spanish subject pronoun expression. In A. Ghimenton, A. Nardy, & J.-P. Chevrot, (eds.) Sociolinguistic variation and language acquisition across the lifespan (pp. 82–101). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.26.04shi
  • Shin, N. L. (2022a). Está abriendo, la abrió Lexical knowledge, verb type, and grammatical aspect shape child heritage speakers’ direct object omission in Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism, 136700692211244. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069221124475
  • Shin, N., Cuza, A., & Sánchez, L. (2023). Structured variation, language experience, and crosslinguistic influence shape child heritage speakers’ Spanish direct objects. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 26(2), 317–329. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728922000694
  • Shin, N., Marchesi, M., & Morford, J. P. (2021). Pathways of development in child heritage speakers’ use of Spanish demonstratives. Spanish as a Heritage Language, 1(2), 222–246. https://doi.org/10.5744/shl.2021.1150
  • Silva-Corvalán, C., & Enrique-Arias, A. (2017). Sociolinguistica Y Pragmatica Del Espanol. Georgetown University Press.
  • Smith, J., & Adger, D. (2005). Variation and the minimalist programme. In L. Cornips & K. Corrigan, (eds.) Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the Social (pp. 149–178). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.265.10adg
  • Smith, J., & Durham, M. (2019). Sociolinguistic variation in children’s language. Acquiring community norms. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316779248
  • Smith, J., Durham, M., & Fortune, L. (2007). “Mam, my trousers is fa’in doon!”: Community, caregiver, and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish Dialect. Language Variation and Change, 19(1), 63–99. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394507070044
  • Sneller, B., & Newport, E. (2020). Acquisition of phonological variation: Evidence from artificial language learning. Poster presented at the 45th Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA, November 2020.
  • Snyder, W. (2007). Child language: A parametric approach. Oxford University Press.
  • Toribio, J. (2000). Setting parametric limits on dialectal variation in Spanish. Lingua, 110(5), 315–341. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024-3841(99)00044-3
  • Torres Cacoullos, R., & Walker, J. A. (2009). On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas: A variationist study of that. Linguistics, 47(1), 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1515/LING.2009.001
  • Travis, C., & Torres Cacoullos, R. (2012). What do pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical, and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics, 23(4), 711–748. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2012-0022
  • Travis, C., & Torres Cacoullos, R. (2021). Categories and frequency: Cognition verbs in Spanish Subject Expression. Languages, 6(3), 126. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6030126
  • Valdés, G. (2005). Bilingualism, heritage language learners, and SLA research: Opportunities lost or seized? The Modern Language Journal, 89(3), 410–426. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2005.00314.x
  • Villa-Garcia, J., Snyder, W., & Riqueros-Morante, J. (2010). On the analysis of Lexical subjects in Caribbean and Mainland Spanish: Evidence from L1 acquisition. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 34) (Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 34)), Boston, MA. Cascadilla Press.
  • Weldon, T. (1995). Variability in negation in African American vernacular English. Language Variation and Change, 6(3), 359–397. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500001721
  • Westergaard, M. (2009). Usage-based vs. rule-based learning: The acquisition of word order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian. Journal of Child Language, 36(5), 1023–1051. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000909009349
  • Wilson, J., & Henry, A. (1998). Parameter setting within a socially realistic linguistics. Language in Society, 27(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500019709
  • Wolfram, W. (1989). Structural variability in phonological development: Final nasals in vernacular. In B. English, R. W. Fasold, & D. Schriffin (Eds.), Language variation and change (pp. 301–332). https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.52.18wol
  • Yang, C. (2002). Knowledge and learning in natural language. Oxford University Press.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.