Rappin on the copula coffin: theoretical and meth-

is

V

hension is in advance of production, the age range of

350 Variation in Child LanguageChildren differ greatly from each other in their rates

oodacforelaSl(1oreviFcrCre

V

Ctosthariation among Children what they hear. Although most well-controlled stud-ies of early word learning have found that compre-odological issues in the analysis of copula variation inAfrican-American Vernacular English. Language Varia-tion and Change 3, 103132.

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Variation in First Language AcquE Lieven, Max Planck Institute for EvolutionaryAnthropology, Leipzig, Germany

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Rickford J, Ball A, Blake R, Jackson R & Martin N (1991).f learning language, and there are also many reportsf differences in the process of acquisition. Theseifferences are relatively well documented for thequisition of English, but are poorly documentedr children learning other languages. In this article,ferences to variation among children learningnguages other than English are to the articles inobin (1985) unless otherwise indicated. Lieven997) and Peters (1997) contain detailed surveys

f the cross-linguistic evidence. Bates et al. (1988)port the most detailed longitudinal study of indi-dual differences in the early learning of English, andenson et al. (1994) provide the most comprehensiveoss-sectional overview based on the Macarthurommunicative Development Inventory, a parentalport measure.

ariation in Early Comprehension and Production

hildren vary considerably in when they first startshow signs of comprehension and when they first

art producing words. Because much depends onow comprehension and production are defined, it isRoberts J & Labov W (1995). Learning to talkPhiladelphian. Language Variation and Change 7,101122.

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itiondifficult to give an exact age range for these activities.Comprehension of individual words such as Nostarts very early, and of course, children can use con-textual cues to interpret the utterances of thosearound them without necessarily parsing much ofproduction is, if anything, even more varied, withsome children producing their first words (as reportedby parents) at around 10 months whereas othersmight not produce more than a few recognizablewords before 1618 months (Fenson et al., 1994).For most children, progress in comprehension andin production is highly correlated, but there arereports of children whose comprehension outstripstheir production by much more than the normalextent (Bates et al., 1988). Children who are morethan 1 standard deviation (SD) or sometimes 1.5 SDbelow the mean on standardized tests of language areusually considered to be late talkers. Among thisgroup are children who catch up and join the normalrange, as well as a group of children who go on tobe defined as having specific language impairment(Rescorla et al., 2000). Many studies, though notall, have found that girls tend to start to producewords earlier than boys (Fenson et al., 1994). Thereare also some studies indicating that first-born chil-dren start to produce words earlier than subsequent-born children (Fenson et al., 1994; Pine, 1995). It is

extent to which they pick up on the major tunes of

Variation in First Language Acquisition 351the language or tend to produce shorter and morewell-articulated utterances (for detailed summaries,see Lieven, 1997; Peters, 1997). The prosodic ortune strategy involves using chunks of prosodicstructure with the prosodic properties associatedwith questions, attentional utterances, naming utter-ances, and imperatives. For example, within theseintonational envelopes, the child might produce aquite long vocalization with the intonation of a ques-tion but with large numbers of schwas and only oneor two clear words. Most children will use bothstrategies, but there are clearly some children whoveer toward the extremes of one or the other.

Variation in Early Lexicon and Early Structure

For English-learning children with the same meanlength of utterance (MLU), there are large individualdifferences in the relative proportions of nouns orfrozen phrases in their early lexicons (Nelson, 1973,1981; Lieven et al., 1992). The proportion of nounsis related to the extent to which their caretakersuse nouns and elicit the names of objects fromthe children (Masur et al., 2004). There is also amajor debate on whether nouns are predominantin childrens early lexicons independently of thelanguage they are learning (suggesting a cognitiveadvantage for the learning of nouns; see Gentnerand Boroditsky, 2001) or whether the proportion ofnouns depends on features of the language beinglearned; for instance, argument drop and agreementmarking on the verb might give verbs more promi-nence (see Choi and Gopnik, 1995). There are alsosome reports of individual differences in otherimportant to emphasize, however, that these groupstatistics disguise a huge range of variation and thatthere are very many children who are exceptions tothese group averages.

In addition to the timing of comprehension andproduction and the rate at which children learn,there is considerable variability in the process ofearly language production. An early stage of rela-tively accurate matching of a small number of pro-ductions of adult words is often followed by a highlyindividual phase where each child produces a widerrange of words, most of which are reduced to aphonological template. The nature of this templatevaries from child to child, though it always bears aphonological and segmental relationship to theparticular language being learned (Vihman, 1996).

There are studies of English and other languages(Hebrew, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Hungarian,French, Finnish, German, Portuguese) that suggestthat children may differ from very early on in thelanguages; for instance, in Japanese. The proportionof nouns may also affect how children move intoproducing longer utterances, with those who have arelatively larger vocabulary of nouns using a morecombinatorial strategy, whereas those with relative-ly more frozen phrases start by producing multiwordslot-and-frame patterns (Nelson, 1973; Lieven et al.,1997).

Use of the prosodic or phrasal strategy can result inthe child developing prosodic placeholders for par-ticular morphemes of the language (e.g., the deter-miner slot in English, verbal suffixes in Turkish, ornoun class prefixes in Sesotho). Children then startto break down these long prosodic strings and towork out their internal structure (Peters and Menn,1993; Veneziano and Sinclair, 2000). The combinato-rial strategy involves putting words together on thebasis of pragmatic, cognitive, or primitive syntacticstrategies (Bloom et al., 1975). These strategies maywork better for some languages, or some systems in aparticular language, than they do for others.

Where verb arguments are relatively unambigu-ously indicated either by word order or case inflec-tions, children start learning this early, at least forparticular verbs. However, there are many languagesin which argument marking is mixed or opaque.There are reports of children varying in their rela-tive dependence on case marking or word order inlearning Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Serbo-Croatian,and Hungarian. In addition, studies report differencesin the degree to which children depend on adult wordorder (Polish, German, French, Samoan, Korean) andof variability in case marking (Georgian, Japanese,Polish, Italian).

Children (and adults) also vary greatly in the extentof their productivity. This variation can be identifiedin the overgeneralizations that they make. Some indi-viduals may depend more on item-specific learning,whereas others are more willing to generalize to novelwords or constructions (Indefrey, 2002).

Variation in Sentential Operations and LaterSyntactic Development

Children can differ in their early placement of thenegation marker in English, with some placing itincorrectly in sentence-initial position (No fit in thebox), whereas others place it correctly from the outset(Slobin, 1985). Maratsos and Kuczaj (cited in Lieven,1997) also reported that, at a later stage, English-speaking children differ in whether they place thenegation marker correctly after the first auxiliary (asin The boy should not have been eating Jello) orincorrectly before the main verb (as in She couldhave been not sleeping for She could not have beensleeping).

(cf. Slobin et al., 1996, Kyratzis and Guo, 2001).

352 Variation in First Language AcquisitionCauses of Variation

Effects of the Input

One major cause of variation among children is theparticular input they hear from those around them.However, relationships between characteristics of theinput and language development are complex. At ageneral level, there are relationships between theamount of talking to children and the rate of languagelearning (Hart and Risley, 1995). In the early stages,there are also relationships between the rate of lan-guage development and the ways in which adults usetheir language: More ostensive speech (e.g., namingobjects while looking at a book) and directives relatedto the childs ongoing behavior (e.g., telling the child,Put the train over here, while the child is playingwith a train) assist learning, whereas attentionaldirectives (saying to the child, Look at that train,while the child is occupied with something else) seemto be negatively related (Akhtar et al., 1991; Pine,1992, 1994; Masur et al., 2004).

There are also suggestions of a relationship be-tween the type of input and stylistic differences. Chil-dren who exhibit a highly phrasal strategy may bereceiving a less parsable input. Thus, Pine (1995)showed that second-born children were significantlyThere is considerable variation among childrenlearning English in the degree to which they makeuninversion errors in interrogatives (What I can do?;Rowland et al., in press). This variation is alsoreported for inversion after wo (where) in German.There are also reports for other languages that chil-dren differ in the scope that they assign to interroga-tive particles (Hungarian, Kaluli) and in the correctplacement of the interrogative marker (for instance,in Hebrew).

In many different languages, some children seem toinitially combine clauses using simple juxtaposition;others may use just one unambiguous conjunction,while still others produce the coordinating orsubordinating conjunctions (if) required by their lan-guage from the outset. These types of variation withinand across languages should be an important contri-bution to the attempt to explain overall patterns ofclause combining by appeals to either syntactic orcognitive complexity.

Finally little attention has been paid to individualdifferences in pragmatic development (for some obser-vations, see Ninio and Snow, 1996; for the effects offriendship group, see Kyratzis et al., 2001) with theexception of gender differences, which are relativelywell documented, especially as children grow oldermore likely to show this strategy than their first-bornsiblings. Wong Fillmore (1979) reported that thishighly phrasal strategy characterized some child L2learners immersed in a school situation. Brice Heath(1983) reported its use by children in her Tracktongroup, a working-class African-American group whodid not seem to be addressed with the child-directedspeech (CDS) typical of more middle-class environ-ments. Finally, Bates et al. (1998) reported that herdaughter Julia, who had been a classic combinatori-al child in her L1 learning, was much more phrasalwhen learning her L2, Italian, in more group-basedsituations.

There are also many reports of relationships be-tween the frequency of forms in the input and theorder of acquisition of these forms: for instance,the acquisition of English morphemes, verbs, auxili-aries, verb argument structure, and correctly invertedwh-questions. However, the issues are quite complexfor several reasons. First, frequency in the inputdoes not guarantee that a child will produce a form:cognitive complexity, saliency, and pragmatic use-fulness to the child will also be important. Second,it is one thing for a child to learn a form fromthe input, but a critical question is how this is relatedto a more abstract representation of the linguisticsystem. Over this question there is much debate (seearticles by Pine, Richards, and Lieven in Gallowayand Richards, 1994, and Tomasello, 2000). An im-portant issue is not just the absolute frequency ofparticular forms but the type and token relation-ships between forms and categories (Theakstonet al., 2005).

Effects of input are important throughout the lan-guage learning process. Huttenlocher et al. (2002)showed that childrens comprehension of complexsyntax was significantly related to the relative fre-quency with which parents used complex syntaxin their speech. The same measure in the speech oftheir nursery-school teachers was related to childrensgrowth in comprehension over the school year,whereas socioeconomic status was not.

Child-Determined Causes of Variation

The question of whether genetic differences amongchildren could cause differences in language develop-ment and, if so, whether this is an effect specific tolanguage or one caused by non-linguistic differences for instance, by differences in one or more generalcognitive abilities is of considerable complexity andinterest. To date, results suggest that there are bothgenetic and environmental causes of early differencesand that, at age 2;0, some of these causes may bespecifically related to language skills (Plomin andDale, 2000). However, there is evidence that genetic

influences on vocabulary and grammar correlate

verbs (e.g., her has a tummy ache; Pine et al., 2005).

psychologically realistic account of the process by

Kyratzis A & Guo J (2001). Preschool girls and boys ver-

talk. In Marcos H (ed.) Early pragmatic development

Variation in First Language Acquisition 353This difference in childrens willingness to linguisti-cally risk take is quite well documented, and such awillingness to take linguistic risks may characterizechildren who learn the language very quickly. It hasbeen suggested that linguistic risk taking may berelated to a more general risk-taking strategy onthe part of some children, but this has not been wellresearched.

Gender differences in the rate of language develop-ment are well documented, certainly for the later stagesand, in many studies, for early acquisition as well(Fenson et al., 1994). Boys are also over-representedin groups of late talkers, those with specific languageimpairment, and stutterers.

Finally there have been a number of suggestions inthe literature that varying language acquisition stra-tegies could arise from neuropsychological differ-ences in the brain. For instance in those who are leftlateralized for language, the right hemisphere (RH) ismore concerned with musical representations, where-as the left, as is well established, subsumes language.There are theories that suggest initial languagelearning occurs in the RH, which is then taken overby the left hemisphere, and that differences amongchildren reflect the extent to which they continue touse the RH to analyze language. Very much morebasic neuropsychological work needs to be done be-fore it would be possible to test these hypothesessuccessfully (for an outline, see Shore, 1995).

Conclusions

All theories of language development need to be ableto account for the range of variation that childrenshow. The pervasive effects of the input, includingdifferent types of frequency, must be incorporated;these effects make it difficult to sustain explanationsthat depend simply on the child hearing small num-bers of examples of each structure. Dismissing varia-tion among children as noise involves throwingout of consideration crucial data for developing ahighly at 2;0 and at 3;0 (Dionne et al., 2003) andthat, at least by age 4;0, genetic differences in languageoverlap substantially with genetic influences onindividual differences in other cognitive abilities(Colledge et al., 2002).

There seem to be clear differences among chil-dren in their willingness to generalize and overgener-alize: Thus, Abe was not only the master of pasttense overgeneralization (Maratsos, 2000) but healso produced relatively large numbers of femininenon-nominative subject pronouns (her) with agreeing[Special issue]. First Language 21, 387431.bal conflict strategies in the U. S. & China: cross-culturaland contextual considerations. Research on Languageand Social Interaction 34, 4574.

Kyratzis A, Marx T & Wade E R (2001). Pre-schoolers communicative competence: register shift in themarking of power in different contexts of friendship groupwhich children the world over learn language.

See also: Cross-Linguistic Comparative Approaches to

Language Acquisition; Infancy: Phonological Develop-

ment; Language Development: Overview; Language in

the Nondominant Hemisphere; Lexical Conceptual Struc-

ture; Specific Language Impairment.

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Introduction

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of the 20th century may well be the earliest study ofvariation within a single speech community.

While geographical variation continues to play animportant role in distinguishing speakers from differ-ent parts of the French-speaking world or even fromdifferent regions, this article will focus on social vari-ation. However, the geographic dimension will beevoked through the comparison of variation studiesin different communities. Rather than attempt to super-ficially describe a large number of variables, this arti-cle will examine a few variables that have beeninvestigated in numerous speech communities and

Variation in First Language AcquisitionVariation among ChildrenVariation in Early Comprehension and ProductionVariation in Early Lexicon and Early StructureVariation in Sentential Operations and Later Syntactic Development

Causes of VariationEffects of the InputChild-Determined Causes of Variation

ConclusionsBibliography