It has long been known that children may use a particular grammatical morpheme inconsistently at early stages of acquisition. Although this has often been thought to be evidence of incomplete syntactic representations, there is now a large body of crosslinguistic evidence showing that much of this early within-speaker variability is due to still…

Pronoun reversal, the use of "you" for self-reference and "I" for an addressee, has often been associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and impaired language. However, recent case studies have shown the phenomenon also to occur in typically developing and even precocious talkers. This study examines longitudinal corpus data from two…

Researchers have long been puzzled by children's variable omission of grammatical morphemes, often attributing this to a lack of semantic or syntactic competence. Recent studies suggest that some of this variability may be due to phonological constraints. This paper explored this issue further by conducting a longitudinal study of five…

Researchers have long noted that children's grammatical morphemes are variably produced, raising questions about when and how grammatical competence is acquired. This study examined the spontaneous production of determiners by two French-speaking children aged 1 ; 5-2 ; 5. It found that determiners were produced earlier with monosyllabic words,…