350 Variation in Child Language

Ochs E & Schieffelin B B (1984). Language acquisition and

socialization: three developmental stories and their implications. In Shweder R & Levine R (eds.) Culture theory:
essays in mind, self and emotion. New York: Cambridge
University Press. 276320.
Rickford J, Ball A, Blake R, Jackson R & Martin N (1991).
Rappin on the copula coffin: theoretical and methodological issues in the analysis of copula variation in
African-American Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change 3, 103132.
Roberts J (1997a). Acquisition of variable rules: a study of
(-t, d) deletion. Journal of Child Language 24, 351372.
Roberts J (1997b). Hitting a moving target: acquisition
of sound change in progress by Philadelphia children.
Language Variation and Change 11, 249266.
Roberts J (2002). Child language variation. In Chambers J
K, Trudgill P & Schilling-Estes N (eds.) The handbook
of language variation and change. Oxford: Blackwell.
333438.
Roberts J (2005). Withstanding the flatlanders: the case of
glottal stop in Vermont. Manuscript in preparation.

Roberts J & Labov W (1995). Learning to talk

Philadelphian. Language Variation and Change 7,
101122.
Ruhlen M (1978). Nasal vowels. In Greenberg J H (ed.)
Universals of human language, vol. 2: phonology.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Sapir E (1921). Language: an introduction to the study of
speech. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Starks D & Bayard D (2002). Individual variation in the
acquisition of postvocalic /r/: day care and sibling order
as potential variables. American Speech 77(2), 184194.
Tranel B (1968). Concreteness in generative phonology:
evidence from French. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Wolfram W (1969). A sociolinguistic description of Detroit
Negro speech. Washington, DC: Center for Applied
Linguistics.
Wolfram W (1989). Structural variability in phonological
development: final nasals in Vernacular Black English. In
Fasold R W & Schiffrin D (eds.) Language change and
variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 301332.

Variation in First Language Acquisition

E Lieven, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Variation among Children

Children differ greatly from each other in their rates
of learning language, and there are also many reports
of differences in the process of acquisition. These
differences are relatively well documented for the
acquisition of English, but are poorly documented
for children learning other languages. In this article,
references to variation among children learning
languages other than English are to the articles in
Slobin (1985) unless otherwise indicated. Lieven
(1997) and Peters (1997) contain detailed surveys
of the cross-linguistic evidence. Bates et al. (1988)
report the most detailed longitudinal study of individual differences in the early learning of English, and
Fenson et al. (1994) provide the most comprehensive
cross-sectional overview based on the Macarthur
Communicative Development Inventory, a parental
report measure.
Variation in Early Comprehension and Production

Children vary considerably in when they first start

to show signs of comprehension and when they first
start producing words. Because much depends on
how comprehension and production are defined, it is

difficult to give an exact age range for these activities.

Comprehension of individual words such as No
starts very early, and of course, children can use contextual cues to interpret the utterances of those
around them without necessarily parsing much of
what they hear. Although most well-controlled studies of early word learning have found that comprehension is in advance of production, the age range of
production is, if anything, even more varied, with
some children producing their first words (as reported
by parents) at around 10 months whereas others
might not produce more than a few recognizable
words before 1618 months (Fenson et al., 1994).
For most children, progress in comprehension and
in production is highly correlated, but there are
reports of children whose comprehension outstrips
their production by much more than the normal
extent (Bates et al., 1988). Children who are more
than 1 standard deviation (SD) or sometimes 1.5 SD
below the mean on standardized tests of language are
usually considered to be late talkers. Among this
group are children who catch up and join the normal
range, as well as a group of children who go on to
be defined as having specific language impairment
(Rescorla et al., 2000). Many studies, though not
all, have found that girls tend to start to produce
words earlier than boys (Fenson et al., 1994). There
are also some studies indicating that first-born children start to produce words earlier than subsequentborn children (Fenson et al., 1994; Pine, 1995). It is

Variation in First Language Acquisition 351

important to emphasize, however, that these group

statistics disguise a huge range of variation and that
there are very many children who are exceptions to
these group averages.
In addition to the timing of comprehension and
production and the rate at which children learn,
there is considerable variability in the process of
early language production. An early stage of relatively accurate matching of a small number of productions of adult words is often followed by a highly
individual phase where each child produces a wider
range of words, most of which are reduced to a
phonological template. The nature of this template
varies from child to child, though it always bears a
phonological and segmental relationship to the
particular language being learned (Vihman, 1996).
There are studies of English and other languages
(Hebrew, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Hungarian,
French, Finnish, German, Portuguese) that suggest
that children may differ from very early on in the
extent to which they pick up on the major tunes of
the language or tend to produce shorter and more
well-articulated utterances (for detailed summaries,
see Lieven, 1997; Peters, 1997). The prosodic or
tune strategy involves using chunks of prosodic
structure with the prosodic properties associated
with questions, attentional utterances, naming utterances, and imperatives. For example, within these
intonational envelopes, the child might produce a
quite long vocalization with the intonation of a question but with large numbers of schwas and only one
or two clear words. Most children will use both
strategies, but there are clearly some children who
veer toward the extremes of one or the other.
Variation in Early Lexicon and Early Structure

For English-learning children with the same mean

length of utterance (MLU), there are large individual
differences in the relative proportions of nouns or
frozen phrases in their early lexicons (Nelson, 1973,
1981; Lieven et al., 1992). The proportion of nouns
is related to the extent to which their caretakers
use nouns and elicit the names of objects from
the children (Masur et al., 2004). There is also a
major debate on whether nouns are predominant
in childrens early lexicons independently of the
language they are learning (suggesting a cognitive
advantage for the learning of nouns; see Gentner
and Boroditsky, 2001) or whether the proportion of
nouns depends on features of the language being
learned; for instance, argument drop and agreement
marking on the verb might give verbs more prominence (see Choi and Gopnik, 1995). There are also
some reports of individual differences in other

languages; for instance, in Japanese. The proportion

of nouns may also affect how children move into
producing longer utterances, with those who have a
relatively larger vocabulary of nouns using a more
combinatorial strategy, whereas those with relatively more frozen phrases start by producing multiword
slot-and-frame patterns (Nelson, 1973; Lieven et al.,
1997).
Use of the prosodic or phrasal strategy can result in
the child developing prosodic placeholders for particular morphemes of the language (e.g., the determiner slot in English, verbal suffixes in Turkish, or
noun class prefixes in Sesotho). Children then start
to break down these long prosodic strings and to
work out their internal structure (Peters and Menn,
1993; Veneziano and Sinclair, 2000). The combinatorial strategy involves putting words together on the
basis of pragmatic, cognitive, or primitive syntactic
strategies (Bloom et al., 1975). These strategies may
work better for some languages, or some systems in a
particular language, than they do for others.
Where verb arguments are relatively unambiguously indicated either by word order or case inflections, children start learning this early, at least for
particular verbs. However, there are many languages
in which argument marking is mixed or opaque.
There are reports of children varying in their relative dependence on case marking or word order in
learning Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Serbo-Croatian,
and Hungarian. In addition, studies report differences
in the degree to which children depend on adult word
order (Polish, German, French, Samoan, Korean) and
of variability in case marking (Georgian, Japanese,
Polish, Italian).
Children (and adults) also vary greatly in the extent
of their productivity. This variation can be identified
in the overgeneralizations that they make. Some individuals may depend more on item-specific learning,
whereas others are more willing to generalize to novel
words or constructions (Indefrey, 2002).
Variation in Sentential Operations and Later
Syntactic Development

Children can differ in their early placement of the

negation marker in English, with some placing it
incorrectly in sentence-initial position (No fit in the
box), whereas others place it correctly from the outset
(Slobin, 1985). Maratsos and Kuczaj (cited in Lieven,
1997) also reported that, at a later stage, Englishspeaking children differ in whether they place the
negation marker correctly after the first auxiliary (as
in The boy should not have been eating Jello) or
incorrectly before the main verb (as in She could
have been not sleeping for She could not have been
sleeping).

352 Variation in First Language Acquisition

There is considerable variation among children

learning English in the degree to which they make
uninversion errors in interrogatives (What I can do?;
Rowland et al., in press). This variation is also
reported for inversion after wo (where) in German.
There are also reports for other languages that children differ in the scope that they assign to interrogative particles (Hungarian, Kaluli) and in the correct
placement of the interrogative marker (for instance,
in Hebrew).
In many different languages, some children seem to
initially combine clauses using simple juxtaposition;
others may use just one unambiguous conjunction,
while still others produce the coordinating or
subordinating conjunctions (if) required by their language from the outset. These types of variation within
and across languages should be an important contribution to the attempt to explain overall patterns of
clause combining by appeals to either syntactic or
cognitive complexity.
Finally little attention has been paid to individual
differences in pragmatic development (for some observations, see Ninio and Snow, 1996; for the effects of
friendship group, see Kyratzis et al., 2001) with the
exception of gender differences, which are relatively
well documented, especially as children grow older
(cf. Slobin et al., 1996, Kyratzis and Guo, 2001).

Causes of Variation
Effects of the Input

One major cause of variation among children is the

particular input they hear from those around them.
However, relationships between characteristics of the
input and language development are complex. At a
general level, there are relationships between the
amount of talking to children and the rate of language
learning (Hart and Risley, 1995). In the early stages,
there are also relationships between the rate of language development and the ways in which adults use
their language: More ostensive speech (e.g., naming
objects while looking at a book) and directives related
to the childs ongoing behavior (e.g., telling the child,
Put the train over here, while the child is playing
with a train) assist learning, whereas attentional
directives (saying to the child, Look at that train,
while the child is occupied with something else) seem
to be negatively related (Akhtar et al., 1991; Pine,
1992, 1994; Masur et al., 2004).
There are also suggestions of a relationship between the type of input and stylistic differences. Children who exhibit a highly phrasal strategy may be
receiving a less parsable input. Thus, Pine (1995)
showed that second-born children were significantly

more likely to show this strategy than their first-born

siblings. Wong Fillmore (1979) reported that this
highly phrasal strategy characterized some child L2
learners immersed in a school situation. Brice Heath
(1983) reported its use by children in her Trackton
group, a working-class African-American group who
did not seem to be addressed with the child-directed
speech (CDS) typical of more middle-class environments. Finally, Bates et al. (1998) reported that her
daughter Julia, who had been a classic combinatorial child in her L1 learning, was much more phrasal
when learning her L2, Italian, in more group-based
situations.
There are also many reports of relationships between the frequency of forms in the input and the
order of acquisition of these forms: for instance,
the acquisition of English morphemes, verbs, auxiliaries, verb argument structure, and correctly inverted
wh-questions. However, the issues are quite complex
for several reasons. First, frequency in the input
does not guarantee that a child will produce a form:
cognitive complexity, saliency, and pragmatic usefulness to the child will also be important. Second,
it is one thing for a child to learn a form from
the input, but a critical question is how this is related
to a more abstract representation of the linguistic
system. Over this question there is much debate (see
articles by Pine, Richards, and Lieven in Galloway
and Richards, 1994, and Tomasello, 2000). An important issue is not just the absolute frequency of
particular forms but the type and token relationships between forms and categories (Theakston
et al., 2005).
Effects of input are important throughout the language learning process. Huttenlocher et al. (2002)
showed that childrens comprehension of complex
syntax was significantly related to the relative frequency with which parents used complex syntax
in their speech. The same measure in the speech of
their nursery-school teachers was related to childrens
growth in comprehension over the school year,
whereas socioeconomic status was not.
Child-Determined Causes of Variation

The question of whether genetic differences among

children could cause differences in language development and, if so, whether this is an effect specific to
language or one caused by non-linguistic differences
for instance, by differences in one or more general
cognitive abilities is of considerable complexity and
interest. To date, results suggest that there are both
genetic and environmental causes of early differences
and that, at age 2;0, some of these causes may be
specifically related to language skills (Plomin and
Dale, 2000). However, there is evidence that genetic

Variation in First Language Acquisition 353

influences on vocabulary and grammar correlate

highly at 2;0 and at 3;0 (Dionne et al., 2003) and
that, at least by age 4;0, genetic differences in language
overlap substantially with genetic influences on
individual differences in other cognitive abilities
(Colledge et al., 2002).
There seem to be clear differences among children in their willingness to generalize and overgeneralize: Thus, Abe was not only the master of past
tense overgeneralization (Maratsos, 2000) but he
also produced relatively large numbers of feminine
non-nominative subject pronouns (her) with agreeing
verbs (e.g., her has a tummy ache; Pine et al., 2005).
This difference in childrens willingness to linguistically risk take is quite well documented, and such a
willingness to take linguistic risks may characterize
children who learn the language very quickly. It has
been suggested that linguistic risk taking may be
related to a more general risk-taking strategy on
the part of some children, but this has not been well
researched.
Gender differences in the rate of language development are well documented, certainly for the later stages
and, in many studies, for early acquisition as well
(Fenson et al., 1994). Boys are also over-represented
in groups of late talkers, those with specific language
impairment, and stutterers.
Finally there have been a number of suggestions in
the literature that varying language acquisition strategies could arise from neuropsychological differences in the brain. For instance in those who are left
lateralized for language, the right hemisphere (RH) is
more concerned with musical representations, whereas the left, as is well established, subsumes language.
There are theories that suggest initial language
learning occurs in the RH, which is then taken over
by the left hemisphere, and that differences among
children reflect the extent to which they continue to
use the RH to analyze language. Very much more
basic neuropsychological work needs to be done before it would be possible to test these hypotheses
successfully (for an outline, see Shore, 1995).

Conclusions
All theories of language development need to be able
to account for the range of variation that children
show. The pervasive effects of the input, including
different types of frequency, must be incorporated;
these effects make it difficult to sustain explanations
that depend simply on the child hearing small numbers of examples of each structure. Dismissing variation among children as noise involves throwing
out of consideration crucial data for developing a

psychologically realistic account of the process by

which children the world over learn language.
See also: Cross-Linguistic Comparative Approaches to
Language Acquisition; Infancy: Phonological Development; Language Development: Overview; Language in
the Nondominant Hemisphere; Lexical Conceptual Structure; Specific Language Impairment.

Bibliography
Akhtar N et al. (1991). Directive interactions and early
vocabulary development. Journal of Child Language
18, 4149.
Bates E, Bretherton I & Snyder L (1988). From first words
to grammar: individual differences and dissociable
mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bloom L, Lightbown P & Hood L (1975). Structure and
variation in child language. Monographs of the Society
for Research in Child Development 160(40), 2.
Brice Heath S (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Choi S & Gopnik A (1995). Early acquisition of verbs
in Korean: a crosslinguistic study. Journal of Child
Language 22(3), 497529.
Colledge E et al. (2002). The structure of language abilities
at 4 years: a twin study. Developmental Psychology
38(5), 749757.
Dionne G et al. (2003). Genetic evidence for bidirectional
effects of early lexical and grammatical development.
Child Development 7(2), 394412.
Fenson L et al. (1994). Variability in early communicative
development. Monographs of the Society for Research in
Child Development 242(59), 5.
Galloway C & Richards B (eds.) (1994). Input and interaction in language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gentner D & Boroditsky L (2001). Individuation, relativity and early word learning. In Bowerman M &
Levinson S (eds.) Language acquisition and conceptual
development. New York: Cambridge University Press.
215256.
Hart B & Risley T (1995). Meaningful differences in
the everyday experience of young American children.
Baltimore, MD: H. Paul Brookes.
Huttenlocher J et al. (2002). Language input and child
syntax. Cognitive Psychology 45(3), 337374.
Indefrey P (2002). Listen und regeln. Ph.D. diss., Heinrich
Heine University.
Kyratzis A & Guo J (2001). Preschool girls and boys verbal conflict strategies in the U. S. & China: cross-cultural
and contextual considerations. Research on Language
and Social Interaction 34, 4574.
Kyratzis A, Marx T & Wade E R (2001). Preschoolers communicative competence: register shift in the
marking of power in different contexts of friendship group
talk. In Marcos H (ed.) Early pragmatic development
[Special issue]. First Language 21, 387431.

354 Variation in First Language Acquisition

Lieven E (1997). Variation in a crosslinguistic context. In
Slobin D I (ed.) The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, vol. 5. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 199263.
Lieven E, Pine J & Baldwin G (1997). Lexically-based
learning and the development of grammar in early
multi-word speech. Journal of Child Language 24(1),
187219.
Lieven E V M, Pine J M & Dresner Barnes H (1992).
Individual differences in early vocabulary development:
redefining the referential-expressive dimension. Journal
of Child Language 19, 287310.
Maratsos M (2000). More overregularisation after all:
new data and discussion on Marcus, Pinker, Ullman,
Hollander, Rosen & Xu. Journal of Child Language
27, 183212.
Masur F, Flynn E & Eichorst D L (2004). Maternal responsive and directive behaviours and utterances as predictors of childrens lexical development. Journal of
Child Language 32(1), 6392.
Nelson K (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to
talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child
Development 149(38), 12.
Nelson K (1981). Individual differences in language development: implications for development and language.
Developmental Psychology 17, 170187.
Ninio A & Snow C (1996). Pragmatic development.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Peters A (1997). Language typology, prosody and the
acquisition of grammatical morphemes. In Slobin D I
(ed.) The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition,
vol. 5. Hillsdale, NJ.: Lawrence Erlbaum. 135197.
Peters A & Menn L (1993). False starts and filler syllables:
ways to learn grammatical morphemes. Language 69,
742777.
Pine J (1992). Maternal style at the early one-word stage:
re-evaluating the stereotype of the directive mother.
Journal of Child Language 12, 169186.
Pine J (1994). Environmental correlates of lexical variation: interactional style and the structure of the input.
Applied Psycholinguistics 15, 355370.

Pine J et al. (2005). Testing the tense/agreement omission

model. Journal of Child Languge.
Pine J M (1995). Variation in vocabulary development as
a function of birth order. Child Development 66,
272281.
Plomin R & Dale P (2000). Genetics of early language
development. In Bishop D & Leonard L (eds.) Speech
and language impairments in children: causes, characteristics, intervention and outcome. Philadelphia:
Psychology Press. 3351.
Rescorla L, Dahlsgaard K & Roberts J (2000). Late-talking
toddlers: MLU and IPSyn outcomes at 3;0 and 4;0.
Journal of Child Language 27(3), 643664.
Rowland C et al. (in press). The incidence of error in young
children wh-questions. Journal of Speech, Language and
Hearing Research.
Shore C (1995). Individual differences in language development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Slobin D I (1985). Crosslinguistic evidence for the languagemaking capacity. In Slobin D I (ed.) The crosslinguistic
study of language acquisition, vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 11571256.
Slobin D I et al. (eds.) (1996). Social interaction,
social context and language: essays in honor of Susan
Ervin-Tripp. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Theakston A et al. (2005). The acquisition of auxiliary
syntax: BE and HAVE. Cognitive Linguistics 16,
247277.
Tomasello M (2000). Do young children have adult
syntactic competence? Cognition 74(3), 209253.
Veneziano E & Sinclair H (2000). The changing status of
filler syllables on the way to grammatical morphemes.
Journal of Child Language 27, 461500.
Vihman M (1996). Phonological development. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Wong Fillmore L (1979). Individual differences in second
language acquisition. In Fillmore C J, Kempler D &
Wang W (eds.) Individual differences in language ability
and language behaviour. New York: Academic Press.
203228.

Variation in French
J Auger, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction
The study of variation occupied a central place in the
early development of French linguistics. For instance,
the pioneering work of Jules Gillie ron for the Atlas
linguistique de France at the turn of the 20th century
has had a major impact on dialectology. Similarly,
the work of Louis Gauchat on the social variation
observed in a small Swiss village at the beginning

of the 20th century may well be the earliest study of

variation within a single speech community.
While geographical variation continues to play an
important role in distinguishing speakers from different parts of the French-speaking world or even from
different regions, this article will focus on social variation. However, the geographic dimension will be
evoked through the comparison of variation studies
in different communities. Rather than attempt to superficially describe a large number of variables, this article will examine a few variables that have been
investigated in numerous speech communities and