Methodological Triangulation in the Study of Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation

ABSTRACT

The well-known sampling limitation of most longitudinal corpus data can be even more consequential in the study of morphosyntactic variation in child language. An analysis of caregiver input suggests that variable use in overlapping contexts may be hard to find by solely relying on corpus data collected under the sampling procedures that are typical in the field. This commentary underscores the importance of methodological triangulation to examine children’s use of variants in controlled identical contexts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).