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Article published In: Child Language Variation: Sociolinguistic and formal approaches
Edited by Véronique Lacoste and Lisa Green
[Linguistic Variation 16:1] 2016
► pp. 131–150

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Acquiring language from variable input

Subject-verb agreement and negative concord in Belfast English

Published online: 13 October 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.16.1.06hen
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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