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Variation in Child Language

J L Roberts, University of Vermont, Burlington,
VT, USA
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The area of child language acquisition, for the most

part, began in the very late 20th century, 40 years
after Labovs groundbreaking work investigating
the social implications of language variation and
change. However, this statement may imply that
sociolinguistics is alone in confining language study
to adults, when this is not at all the case. Linguistics
as a whole, although containing many diverging, and
sometimes conflicting, theoretical perspectives, has
been virtually united as a field with adults-only content. The purpose of this article is to situate the child
in linguistic history, summarize current findings in
child language variation, and argue that despite the
difficulties and shortcomings of this work, there is
interesting and important information to be learned
about language from its not-fully-formed speakers, in
addition to the more obvious and empirically demonstrated premise that there is interesting and important
information to be learned about children from their
language.

Historical Overview
Linguistics in the early 20th century was dominated
by structuralism. The ways of looking at language
structure, which for the most part meant phonological structure, varied, but the emphasis on structure
as opposed to history differentiates the linguistics of
this period from that of the previous century (Hymes
and Fought, 1975: 11). Although language was seen
as a human function and a cultural function, the
focus was not so much on the speakers as on what
was in essence the product of long-continued social
usage (Sapir, 1921: 4). As such, children were seen as
the acquirers of the language of their culture, not as
contributors; their acquisition of language was the
study of another field psychology.

It is not the case that children were never mentioned, however. Bloomfield (1933: 29) speculated
on language learning, which he called the greatest
intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to
perform. Following the highly popular learning theory, he likened the process of language acquisition to
forming a habit based on imitation of caretakers
speech. This habit was later shaped and refined by
corrections from competent speakers when the child
made an error. Bloomfield (1933: 32), in fact, was
quite clear on the interests of linguists in this process
and noted the following:
In the division of scientific labor, the linguist deals only
with the speech signal (r . . .. s); he is not competent
to deal with problems of physiology or psychology.
The findings of the linguist, who studies the speechsignal, will be all the more valuable for the psychologist
if they are not distorted by any pre-possessions about
psychology.

Dialect geographers were similarly occupied with

language structure in this case, its variation across
geographic area, whether lexical or phonological or,
more rarely, grammatical. Kuraths (1939a, 1939b)
large project in the United States was predicated on
the assumptions that geographic variation was best
reflected in the adult speakers of the community,
particularly those who were nonmobile, older, rural,
and male (later termed NORMs by Chambers and
Trudgill (1980)). Although the origin of these features
was of critical importance at the time, it was most
likely to be found in the historical settlement patterns
and geographical barriers and boundaries of the areas
studied (Kurath, 1939a) and not in those young
speakers acquiring the dialects.
Chomsky (1957, 1959, 1965) brought children to
prominence in the context of learnability. That is, in
early versions of generative grammar, the paucity of
input to young children was taken as support for the
heritability of language. However, these children, like
the adult speakers discussed by generative linguists,
were more theoretical than real, and it was not until

Variation in Child Language 345

considerably later that data from real children were

sought (Marcus et al., 1990).
Given this historical context, it is not surprising
that when the study of language variation and change
as a social, as well as regional, phenomenon began in
the mid-20th century, it was with adult or adolescent
speakers (Labov, 1966). Despite the very early work
of Fischer (1958), whose sample comprised 3-, 5-,
and 10-year-old speakers, it was not until more than
20 years later that children younger than the age of 5
years appeared in variation research again. Even then,
this work can more accurately be described as a trickle than a flood. In 1981, Kovac and Adamson explored the deletion of finite be in African-American
Vernacular English (AAVE). This feature of AAVE,
along with others, was (and is) a popular topic of
variation study (Baugh, 1986; Labov, 1969; Rickford
et al., 1991; Wolfram, 1969). Kovac and Adamson,
however, were the first to examine the question of
developmental versus dialectal variation, a particularly difficult issue to differentiate because the feature in
question involved a deletion process that is difficult
to distinguish from nonacquisition but important in
the study of early dialect learning. The researchers
found that although all of their speakers (aged 3, 5,
and 7 years) demonstrated deletion, the constraints
on deletion were more difficult to acquire. In fact, the
children mastered the constraints on copula contraction before those of deletion, which were not fully
acquired at age 7 years (Kovac and Adamson, 1981).
Wolfram (1989) studied even younger speakers of
AAVE, aged 1854 months. He too examined a deletion process in this case, deletion of final nasals with
nasalization of the preceding vowel. He found that
before age 3 years, the children produced virtually no
final nasal segments; after that, however, their acquisitional pattern bore strong relation to that of AAVE,
as spoken by adults. That is, /n/ was preferred as a
target of deletion over /m/ or /N/, and utterance final
/n/ was more frequently deleted than that followed by
another word. Finally, the childrens patterns of deletion tended to plateau at age 3 years and hold steady,
suggesting an acquired and stabilized deletion pattern. Both of these early studies found that the features in question were not clearly apparent in the
youngest children. That is, it was not possible to
determine if the sparseness of the feature was
due to an emerging deletion pattern or an emerging
grammatical (e.g., finite be) or phonological (e.g., the
phoneme /n/) form.
Although these early studies cannot be said to represent a trend toward the study of child language
variation, they did set the stage for examining two
important questions: What can the study of child
language variation tell us about children and the

language acquisition process? and What can the

study of child language acquisition tell us about language? The first question is far more easily dealt with
than the second. The evidence for acquisition can, at
times, be directly observed, and although language
acquisition is not instantaneous, its progress in individuals is more rapid that the course of language change.
Consequently, there are intriguing results that tell us
at least the basics of dialect acquisition, whereas the
discussion of any implications for language as a whole
must be made up primarily of questions.

The Study of Variation and the Language

Acquisition Process
Acquisition of language (particularly phonology) is
assumed to be a process of movement from babbling
to segment and/or rule acquisition. Locke (1983),
however, noted that although this process appears to
be inevitable in normal acquisition, it is far less easy
to document the point of passage from one stage to
another with certainty. There is clear agreement that
babbling is a natural, physiological process. Deaf
children, who have no access to auditory input from
caretakers or auditory feedback from their own productions, nevertheless produce babbled sounds in the
first year of life. In fact, Locke noted that the movement from babbling to speech is generally assumed
to be heavily dependent on naturalness in that those
segments that are easier to produce from a physiological standpoint and more frequent in the target language (not necessarily a coincidental pairing) are
among the first to be acquired by the child. However,
therein lies the complication as well; as Locke (1983:
158) noted,
If phonological segments and rules can be so natural,
it must be difficult indeed to know when a child has
acquired a rule, learned an articulation. . . . Such phonological naturalness may blur the separate contributions of biologically innate mechanisms, environmental
stimulation, and their modes of interaction.

There is a parallel dilemma in the study of child

language variation: at what point does a process such
as deletion stop being a stage on the way to mastery of
a phoneme or morpheme and become an acquired,
but variable, dialectal process? As noted previously,
Kovac and Adamson (1981) found that for deletion
of finite be, the process was still not complete by age
7 years. Their study, however, as well as later ones,
demonstrated a possible venue for exploring this naturalness problem. A segment or its deletion may be
natural and/or developmental, but the constraints
on that process are in some cases language or dialect
specific. One definition of acquisition could then be

346 Variation in Child Language

the presence, absence, or modification of that segment as the speech community requires, not the
adult-like articulation of a given segment.
The process of (-t, d) deletion, a subset of final
consonant cluster reduction, provides an example.
This process, as students of variation well know,
allows the deletion of final /t/ or /d/ in word-final consonant clusters. However, the process is constrained
by phonological and grammatical environmental
conditions, most crucially, in this case, following segment and grammatical form. Although most of the
following segment constraints can be seen as a form
of simplification, and (following Locke) a child
may not be accurately credited for the acquisition of
a rule, the constraints of following pause and grammatical form are not examples of simplification. Guy
and Boyds (1990) examination of the grammatical
constraint and Robertss (1997a) study of both phonological and grammatical constraints explored this
rule in preschool children. Roberts found that the
children age 3 years and older had acquired all the
phonological constraints, including that of following
pause, and although the specific findings differed
slightly, both studies found the children to be in the
midst of learning the grammatical constraints. Even
the 4-year-olds had not completely acquired the adult
rule (Roberts, 1997a).
A study on vowel acquisition revealed similar
results. In this case, 3- and 4-year-old children in
Philadelphia were studied to determine their progress
in learning the short a or (h) vowel (Roberts and
Labov, 1995). This feature is complex, with lexical,
phonological, and grammatical factors conditioning
the raising of short a tokens. As was the case with
(-t, d) deletion, the children were making excellent
progress and had acquired several constraints on
short a. However, some of the constraints continued
to be realized in an inconsistent manner, demonstrating that this phoneme was partially learned, although its articulation was completely mastered by
all the children.
As the previous examples demonstrate, the concept
of acquisition goes beyond the production of the
sounds of speech. This point is not unfamiliar to
psycholinguists researching the acquisition of phonology. Locke (1983: 181), in fact, noted that one may
acquire and use forms without necessarily learning
their precise surface characteristics. He proposed a
study in which adults would be compared on their
ability to learn a phonetically based and a nonphonetically based rule created by the researchers. However, a rule that is unpredictable unless one knows the
dialect of the speaker would seem to be a far better
candidate for study than a hypothetical one, and
children learning their first language would be more

natural subjects. Children who learn that in their

speech community /t/ and /d/ are rarely deleted before
a pause and short a is raised before /S/ but not before
/d/ except in the words mad, bad, and glad are
learning a linguistic rule or pattern, not relying on a
physiological imperative. Systematic variation provides naturally occurring learning and research
opportunities that can be of value to both fields of
study.

The Language Learning Environment

That children acquire phonemes, rules, constraints,
and patterns is a critical point of departure for the
study of child variation. However, the outcome of the
learning process a rule acquired or a pattern mastered is only one facet of this study. It is also important to explore the process by which this learning
occurs. What is the language environment from
which the child learns his or her community norms?
How much of this environment does the child attend
to and use?
There is a large body of work on the subject of
language learning environments in Western culture
(Ferguson, 1977) and others (Ochs and Schieffelin,
1984). In addition to the rich descriptive work these
studies provide, they also help to answer the question
of the necessity or benefit of a modified language
environment for children. This continues to be a
subject of debate, but the cross-cultural work cited
previously does cast doubt on the necessity of a particular (i.e., mainstream, Western) language learning
environment. Whether particular environmental
attributes are beneficial to language acquisition is, at
least to some extent, dependent on the cultural values
of the community. For example, there is evidence that
modification of the childs environment as with childdirected speech may lead to faster language learning
(Clarke-Stewart, 1973), but whether faster is better is
a question to which the answer can vary from one
society to another. It is not the purpose of this article
to enter into this particular debate, but variation
studies can shed light on another aspect of the language learning environment: How does the linguistic environment that children encounter affect their
language and its acquisition?
Again, the study of variation can augment what
is already known through the study of childrens language learning environment. Foulkes et al. (1999)
studied glottalization in forty 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old
children from Newcastle Upon Tyne in England.
Their findings on the acquisition of glottalization
were similar to those on other variables discussed
previously. The children had made progress but not
completed their acquisition of the complicated glottal

Variation in Child Language 347

stop replacement and reinforcement of /t/. In addition, they found that the children demonstrated high
degrees of preaspiration when /t/ was in utterancefinal position, a pattern that cannot be explained
by simplification. Rather, the authors interpretation
was socially based in that they noted that preaspiration was the dominant pattern of young women
speakers in the area those who were also primarily
responsible for child rearing.
Roberts (2002) also found evidence of variable
patterns in the language environments of young children. This study examined the speech of four white
middle-class mothers from Tennessee talking with
their toddlers, aged 18 or 19 months, and with an
interviewer. These mothers were all speakers of
Southern American English, which has as one of its
features the pronunciation of long /aI/ as in time as a
fronted monophthong, or closer to [tm]. All four
mothers used both types of /aI/ but produced more of
the monophthong /aI/ in their speech to the adult
interviewer than with their children. The children,
therefore, heard child-directed speech that comprised
a mix of productions, even though their mothers may
have been presenting them with more examples of the
nonlocal variant than they typically used with adults.
They heard examples of variation: what sounds
within their dialect were malleable and in what
ways. The previous results suggest that child-directed
speech contains the elements necessary for supporting
producers of variation at home in their own speech
communities.
Although caretaker speech has captured the interest of researchers for decades, one concern about this
area of study that has recently become more relevant
is the effect of peers, particularly day care peers, on
childrens speech. This is a particularly important
question for variationists because peer effects are
basic to variation theory and have always been considered and applied to adolescents and adults. It is
this point that has provided the underpinnings for the
network analysis by Milroy and others, who have
used increasingly specific methods to determine exactly who is the speakers network. It seems questionable, at best, to work from the assumption that a
childs, even a very young childs, network consists
solely, or even primarily, of his or her mother. Background information to this effect should be gathered
and included in articles written about acquisition
of variation. Also advisable are studies that focus on
the relative effects of day care and caretaker influence, difficult as these may be to tease apart in the
day-to-day existence of children and families.
Early evidence on this point is mixed but generally
leaning toward less, rather than more, parental influence. For example, Kerswill (1996) found variable

influences in 4-year-olds he studied in Milton Keynes.

Some of the children did demonstrate parental effects
on dialect learning; others were more influenced by
older peers. In any event, the parental influence appeared to disappear by age 8 years. Roberts (1997b)
found that parental effects were seen most easily in
complicated vowel patterns because children who did
not have two native Philadelphia parents did not
acquire the complex short a pattern. Even on simpler
patterns, however, parental effects can be inferred
from the finding that children learned most effectively
the Philadelphia vowel changes most prominent
in their mothers, as opposed to those changes that
have been found to be led by males. It is also relevant
that the only child to make very limited progress in
the acquisition of any of the Philadelphia vowels studied was one with Italian-speaking parents. However,
the fact that this child did sound like a speaker of
American English, not Italian-influenced English,
suggests that peer and other community influences
were already at work; his progress on the Philadelphia
patterns was simply not as rapid as that seen in the
other 3- and 4-year-old children.
Starks and Bayard (2002) also explored this issue
with four young speakers of New Zealand English.
Their findings echoed many of the previously discussed findings in that the children showed markedly
different patterns of acquisition of postvocalic /r/ deletion. Two of the children were virtually nonrhotic
from a very early age and two showed considerably
more rhoticity, even though all four had rhotic parents and nonrhotic peers. Similar results were found
with regard to their acquisition of several New
Zealand vowels. The authors suggested that age of
entry into day care (and exposure to peers) as well as
sibling influence may have been factors in the acquisition differences. Although the study was limited by
a small amount of data, it is notable that Starks and
Bayard found it essential to perform word-by-word
analyses to make sense of the highly variable data.

Some Additional Data

A study of linguistic variation in Vermont (Roberts,
2005) provided an opportunity to explore the day
care vs. home linguistic influence on childrens replacement of /t/ with glottal stop [ ]. This apparently
local variant of /t/ is both stigmatized and, unlike
other localized productions, enduring in the face of
dialect leveling. The data discussed here are a subset
of a larger set representing the speech of children and
adults. The speech of seven 3- to 5-year-olds was
coded as to the use of glottal stop to replace medial
and final /t/ in words. All the children were residents
of Vermont. Three of them had parents who were not

348 Variation in Child Language

Table 1 Glottal replacement of /t/ in children with parents who
use / / and parents who do not use / /
Child

/ / parents
Alice
Jessie
David
Emmy
Non / / parents
Jean
Marie
Cal

Total N

/ /N

%/ /

229
114
55
174

48
15
13
26

20
13
23
14

121
214
174

6
55
17

4
25
9

glottal stop users. One childs parents were from

France and were learning English; one childs single
parent was from the mid-Atlantic region of the United
States; and one childs parents were originally from
Vermont but had extensive travel experience, advanced educational degrees, and a clear dispreference
for Vermont speech patterns. The parents of the other
four children were Vermonters who, to varying
degrees, demonstrated glottal stop replacement of /t/.
It will surprise no one who has read either the
previous discussion or the extensive literature on individual differences in child language acquisition (see
Bates et al., 1995) that although there were indications of trends of influence present in the results, there
was nothing that approached significance in the variable rule analysis of the data. Table 1 shows the
results of the comparison between children with parents who demonstrated / / replacement of /t/ and
those with parents who did not. In general, the children who had glottalization input both at home and
at school appeared to do more glottal replacement
than those who had this input only at school (where
the input was mixed because the teacher was a Vermonter but not all the children came from homes with
the same linguistic environment). Strikingly, however,
the highest replacement percentage came from Marie,
whose input for Vermont speech came from school
only. Maries linguistic background was also the most
different from the others because she was the child
with French-speaking parents. Although Maries
English was quite good, her parents were insufficiently comfortable in English to consent to be interviewed. This background suggested at least two
possibilities for interpreting her glottal stop data.
The first has to do with possible overlap between
the languages. One of the more popular environments
for glottal replacement is word-final /t/ following /n/,
as in the word Vermont, which is derived from
French. French is well-known to include the deletion
of final /n/ and final /n/ plus stop with the nasalization
of the previous vowel (Ruhlen, 1978; Tranel, 1968).

In Vermont speech, this word and others like it are

produced with a nasalized vowel and deleted /n/ followed by / / (Roberts, 2005). Although it is not clear
from the previous research that / / follows the nasalized vowels in French, Locke (1983: 230) noted that
word-final nasalized vowels may be perceived, in any
case, as preceding a glottal stop. The second possibility is that as Marie was learning the English language
as well as the Vermont dialect at school, she was
acquiring the Vermont patterns from her teacher (a
native Vermonter) and her Vermont peers.
Conclusions are difficult to draw from such small
samples. As psycholinguists have found, the process
of language acquisition, like that of language change,
is a complicated one. Slices of cross-sectional data
and group trends are sometimes sufficient only to
hint at possible explanations. Continued examinations of even small amounts of data, such as those
of Starks and Bayard (2002), are necessary to gain
insight into the complexity of child variation.

Conclusion
The study of child variation necessarily combines the
disciplines of both psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Both fields emphasize process as well as outcome, but the emphasis may take on a different tone
in each. In sociolinguistics, the speech of fully formed
individuals is used to explore the process of language
change. Speakers are assumed to be competent speakers of their particular varieties, and the emphasis is
on the change in the variety. In psycholinguistics, fully
formed language is used to explore its development
in speakers. Speakers (children) are assumed to be
moving toward competence, and the emphasis is on
the change in the speaker. The challenge for child
variationists is to bring together two entities, both
of which are in a state of change. It is a difficult
challenge because the sociolinguistic methodology,
exemplified most often by the interview, necessarily
captures a moment in time, both for the language and
for the speaker. On the other hand, the collaboration
affords the researcher an opportunity to make a contribution to both fields since the assumption that
either the language or the speaker is static is an unproven one, at best. The psycholinguist is able to
make use of the stable language assumption by focusing on language forms that change so slowly as to be
pragmatically immobile: tense and case markings and
basic word order. When the focus is on forms that
sociolinguists have found to vary (e.g., phoneme production and lexical forms), the more stable mainstream or standard forms are taken as the goal of the
language learner. The variationist is able to make use
of the stable speaker assumption by focusing on

Variation in Child Language 349

mature speakers in established speech communities,

exemplified by the initial dialectology ideal, the
geographically isolated NORMs. The increasing
mobility of the population at large and the focus on
urban settings and increasingly less isolated rural
settings have created a challenge to the stable speaker
assumption. It is no longer clear that the speaker, even
the mature speaker, resists the linguistic changes
brought about by increased mobility.
Child variationists can provide a venue for exploring this new situation: changing language in changing
speakers. The studies discussed previously demonstrate both the challenges and the benefits of this
work. In summary, we may formulate the following
key points that may be useful to variationists:
1. The necessity for close examination of the data of
individual speakers, even when group trends are
examined. The purpose would be not only to ascertain that individual children are following the
documented group trends, although this is critical
when working with speakers who exhibit developmental as well as dialect variation. It is also important to explore the very complex pattern of
influences on these young speakers and which
influences are largest as well as most enduring
and, therefore, most likely to influence the process
of language change.
2. The importance of exploring the childs network
of relationships to document the influence pattern
and separate fleeting from long-term influences
that may affect not only the speaker but also the
language variety.
Of course, neither of these suggestions represents a
new methodology. Many researchers examine their
data closely to provide interpretive insights that
would be lost in group patterns. In addition, network
analysis has been practiced in some form since the
earliest days of dialect study (Labov, 1966) and continues to be refined (Milroy, 1987). The difference is
that the rapidly changing world demographics today
coupled with the rapidly changing young speakers
make these aspects of method more clearly critical.
We are a long way from identifying the ways in which
children may influence language change in their own
acquisition of that language. However, it is hoped
that variationists may benefit from both the methodological and the theoretical results of the exploration.
See also: Age: Apparent Time and Real Time; Dialect
Atlases; Gender; Infancy: Sensitivity to Linguistic Form;
Social-Cognitive Basis of Language Development;
Sociophonetics; Teenagers, Variation, and Young
Peoples Culture.

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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