In support of varying approaches to the study of variation

Abstract

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 consider perception as well as production data, and to consider acquisition across different domains and different populations of children.