Thisi paper considers the impact of morphosyntactic variation in the input on the language acquisition process. In particular, it studies the acquisition of variable subject-verb agreement and variable negative concord by children acquiring the Belfast dialect of English. It finds that, given variation in the input, children can acquire more than one grammatical variant, although both do not necessarily emerge at the same time in the case of negative concord, forms without negative concord emerge in the children’s language before the use of negative concord is used. It is also found that the proportion of each variant in a child’s output matches the proportion in the input they receive.
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Henry, Alison, R. Maclaren, J. Wilson & C. Finlay. 1997. The acquisition of negative concord in non-standard English. In E. Hughes, M. Hughes & A. Greenhill (eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 269–280. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
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MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Miller, Karen. 2013. Variable input: What Sarah reveals about non-agreeing don’t and theories of root infinitives. Language Acquisition 201. 395–324.
Patterson, Janet L. 1992. The development of sociolinguistic phonological variation patterns for (ing) in young children. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico dissertation.
Renn, Jennifer & J. Michael Terry. 2009. Operationalizing style: quantifying style shift in the speech of African American adolescents. American Speech 841. 367–390.
Roberts, Julie. 1994. Acquisition of variable rules: (-t,d) deletion and (ing) production in preschool children. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.
Romaine, Suzanne. 1984. The language of children and adolescents. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, Jennifer, Mercedes Durham & Liane Fortune. 2007. Community, caregiver and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect’. Language Variation and Change 191. 63–99.
Smith, Jennifer, Mercedes Durham & Hazel Richards. 2013. The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms: caregivers, children, and variation. Linguistics 511. 285–324.
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Tortora, Christina & Marcel den Dikken. 2010. Subject agreement variation: support for the configurational approach. Lingua 1201. 1089–1108.
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Yang, Charles D. 2006. The Infinite Gift. New York: Scribner.
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2004. Sentential Negation and negative concord. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam dissertation.
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2007. Doubling: the semantic driving force behind functional categories. In B. ten Cate & H. Zeevat (eds.), Logic, Language and Computation, 260–280. Berlin: Springer.
2024. Children’s Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation: A Reply to Commentaries. Language Learning and Development 20:1 ► pp. 83 ff.
Jackson, Samantha
2023. Acquisition during normative code-mixing: Trinidadian children’s varilingual pronoun usage. First Language 43:3 ► pp. 283 ff.
Jakubów, Ana Paula da Silva Passos
2023. O contato linguístico e a aquisição da linguagem: considerações sobre a produção variável da concordância de número no português brasileiro,. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada 39:2
Lukyanenko, Cynthia & Karen Miller
2023. Agreeing when to disagree: A corpus analysis of variable agreement in caregiver and child English. Language Variation and Change 35:1 ► pp. 29 ff.
Jakubów, Ana Paula S.P. & Letícia M. Sicuro Corrêa
2019. Sociolinguistic Variation in Children's Language,
Blanchette, Frances & Marianna Nadeu
2018. Prosody and the meanings of English negative indefinites. Journal of Pragmatics 129 ► pp. 123 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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