Acquiring variation in an artificial language: Children and adults are sensitive to socially conditioned linguistic variation

Acquiring variation in an artificial language: Children and adults are sensitive to socially conditioned linguistic variation

Languages exhibit sociolinguistic variation, such that adult native speakers condition the usage of linguistic variants on social context, gender, and ethnicity, among other cues. While the existence of this kind of socially conditioned variation is well-established, less is known about how it is acquired. Studies of naturalistic language use by children provide various examples where children'...

RUNNING HEAD: Socially Meaningful Variation Producing Socially Meaningful Linguistic Variation

It is axiomatic that spoken language is highly variable, and that variability can be observed at nearly every level of linguistic structure, from the acoustic instantiation of speech sounds to the the information structure of long stretches of spoken discourse. Many of the chapters in this volume discuss empirical and theoretical studies of the production of linguistic structures. A challenge t...

Language variation and linguistic invariants

Human languages are diverse and so precise statements of common properties must abstract away from specifics of particular languages. We note several abstract and absolute ‘Type 1’ universals and present some new ones built on a notion of ‘structural invariant’ that applies equally to constituent structure and individual grammatical morphemes. Crucially, these universals may be realized in stru...

Linguistic Invariants and Language Variation

Since the publication of Noam Chomsky’s field founding Syntactic Structures in 1957, generative grammarians have been formulating and studying the grammars of particular languages to extract from them what is general across languages. The idea is that properties which all languages have will give us some insight into the nature of mind. A widely acknowledged problem to which this work has led i...

Perception of geographically conditioned linguistic variation