The acquisition of variation is a fundamental -- but poorly understood -- part of child language acquisition. We fully endorse Shin and Miller's call for us to recognize the importance of this core issue, and argue that our understanding could be further enriched by greater reliance on convergent methods. As such, we implore researchers to…

Based on findings from a variety of research, Shin and Miller (2022) propose a 4-step process that children go through as they learn sociolinguistic variation. Their proposal raises many interesting questions that should inspire future research. Here, I discuss their Step 1 -- the stage in which, according to their proposal, children produce only…

The well-known sampling limitation of most longitudinal corpus data can be even more consequential in the study of morphosyntactic variation in child language. An analysis of caregiver input suggests that variable use in overlapping contexts may be hard to find by solely relying on corpus data collected under the sampling procedures that are…

When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of…

The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

Ambridge argues that the existence of exemplar models for individual phenomena (words, inflection rules, etc.) suggests the feasibility of a unified, exemplars-everywhere model that eschews abstraction. The argument would be strengthened by a description of such a model. However, none is provided. I show that any attempt to do so would immediately…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

Purpose: This commentary responds to the implications for child language intervention of Catts and Kamhi's (2017) call to move from viewing reading comprehension as a single ability to recognizing it as a complex constellation of reader, text, and activity. Method: Reading comprehension, as Catts and Kamhi explain, is very complicated. In this…

Meisel (hereafter, M) has offered a well-argued and tightly structured piece, discussing in a clear and compelling way a crucial topic in the understanding of language change. I applaud him for both the content and the presentation.

This article questions how two very similar sets of experiments can yield such very different findings, and comments on the differences between the studies. Here Annamarie Kerkhoff presents a commentary on some perceived differences between the studies in areas such as age groups and group sizes evaluated. Kerkhoff also comments on some…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

We applaud Stoel-Gammon's (this issue) call for a more comprehensive account of the relationship between lexicon and phonology, and we strongly endorse her suggestions for future research. However, we think that it will not be enough simply to integrate findings and methods from the adult-centered and child-centered literatures. Both of these…

We present a neural network model of learning and processing the English past tense that is based on the notion that experience-dependent cortical development is a core aspect of cognitive development. During learning the model adds and removes units and connections to develop a task-specific final architecture. The model provides an integrated…

Carol Stoel-Gammon has made a real contribution in bringing together two fields that are not generally jointly addressed. Like Stoel-Gammon, we have long focused on individual differences in phonological development (e.g. Vihman, Ferguson & Elbert, 1986; Vihman, Boysson-Bardies, Durand & Sundberg, 1994; Keren-Portnoy, Majorano & Vihman, 2008). And…

When Roger Brown selected Adam, Eve and Sarah to be the first three participants in the modern study of child language, one of the criteria was the intelligibility of their speech (Brown, 1973). According to the prevailing view at the time, accuracy of pronunciation was a peripheral phenomenon that had nothing to do with the development of…