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Part of
Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change: Historical sociolinguistic perspectives
Edited by Israel Sanz-Sánchez
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 14] 2024
► pp. 44–63

Chapter 2
Monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition and language change

ORCID logo | University of New Mexico

This chapter reviews research on children’s monolingual and bilingual acquisition of linguistic variation to consider children’s role in language change. Many patterns of variation are learned early and veridically, but some are acquired late and may be more susceptible to change. Further, children sometimes regularize variable input and may create novel patterns when exposed to different dialects or languages, which suggests that contact settings can serve as breeding grounds for language change. The chapter thus turns to the topic of childhood bilingualism and reviews research on child heritage speakers, whose divergences from their input sometimes persist into adulthood. The chapter culminates by considering the implications of the research reviewed for socially informed models of language change and historical sociolinguistics.

Keywords: child language, bilingual language development, child heritage speakers, heritage grammars, acquisition of linguistic variation, sociolinguistic variation, language change
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Children’s acquisition of (socio)linguistic variation
    • 2.1Timing of acquisition
    • 2.2Children’s innovations
  • 3.Child heritage speakers
    • 3.1Null objects
    • 3.2Gender agreement
    • 3.3Differential object marking
    • 3.4Child heritage speakers and linguistic variation
  • 4.Child language acquisition and the historical sociolinguistics of language change: Challenges and opportunities
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 4 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.14.02shi
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