Chapter published in:
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-ChampaignEdited by Tania Ionin and Matthew Rispoli
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 63] 2019
► pp. 35–58
Children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic variation
Karen Miller | 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
Published online: 15 April 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.03mil
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.03mil
References
References
Chevrot, J-P., Nardy, A., & Barbu, S.
Clark, E.
Eisel Hendricks, A., Miller, K., & Jackson, C.
(2015) Regularization or probability-matching? Acquisition of inconsistent gender marking in Fering-speaking children. In E. Grillo, K. Jepson, & M. LaMendola (Eds.), Boston University Conference on Language Development 39, Online Proceedings Supplement. Retrieved at < http://www.bu.edu/bucld/supplementvol39/>

Foulkes, P., Docherty, G., & Watt, D.
Guasti, M. T., & Rizzi, L.
Guy, G., & Boyd, S.
Kovac, C., & Adamson, H. D.
Lipski, J. M.
Lukyanenko, C., & Miller, K.
MacWhinney, B.
Markman, E., & Wachtel, G.
Miller, K.
(in preparation) Dominican Republic child-caregiver corpus (DRCC). National Science Foundation BCS-1322763, <
http://childlanguagelab.la.psu.edu/research.html>.

Miller, K., & Schmitt, C.
(in preparation) Chilean child-caregiver corpus (CCC). National Science Foundation BCS-1061805 <
http://childlanguagelab.la.psu.edu/research.html>

Miller, K.
Montrul, S. & Potowski, K.
Oetting, J., & McDonald, J.
Pinker, S.
Rispoli, M., Hadley, P., & Holt, J.
Roberts, J.
Schütze, C.
Schütze, C. T., & Wexler, K.
Shin, N.
Singleton, J., & Newport, E.
Smith, J., Durham, M., & Fortune, L.
Wexler, K.