Developmental research has long focused on regularities in language acquisition, minimizing factors that might be responsible for variation. Although researchers are now increasingly concerned with one or another of these factors, this volume brings together research on three different sources of variation: language-specific properties, the nature of the input to children across contexts, and several aspects of the learners themselves. Chapters explore these sources of variation within an interdisciplinary and comparative approach allying theories and methodologies stemming from linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, and neuroscience. The comparative perspective involves different languages, contexts of use, types of learners (first/second language acquisition, monolingual/bilingual learners, autism, language impairment), as well as vocal and visuo-gestural communicative modalities (co-verbal gestures, sign language acquisition). The volume points to the need to enhance interdisciplinary research using complementary methodologies to further examine sources of variation and to integrate variation into a more general developmental theory.

• Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition
• Editorial page
• Title page
• LCC data
• Table of contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction. What can variation tell us about first language acquisition?
  • 1. Why variation in language acquisition?
  • 2. Factors and types of variation
  • 3. The organization of this volume
  • 4. Concluding remarks and future perspectives
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Part I. Universals and cross-linguistic variation in acquisition
• Chapter 1. Templates in child language
  • Introduction
  • 1. Templates
  • 2. Evidence
  • 3. The template as a response to challenges
  • 4. Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix 1a. VCV with vowel melody
  • Appendix 1b. VCV with no vowel melody
• Chapter 2. Phonological categories and their manifestation in child phonology
  • Introduction
  • 1. Background
  • 2. Case study
  • 3. Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 3. Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Phrasal prosody constrains on-line syntactic analysis
  • 3. Function words signal the syntactic category of the following content words
  • 4. Building a syntactic skeleton with phrasal prosody and function words
  • 5. Conclusions and perspectives
  • References
• Chapter 4. Retrieving meaning from noun and verb grammatical contexts: Interindividual variation among 2- to 4-year-old French-speaking children
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Method
  • 3. Results
  • 4. Discussion
  • References
  • Appendix 1. Examples of screen display for the items presented to the children
• Chapter 5. Language-specificity in motion expression: Early acquisition in Korean compared to French and English
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Grammatical characteristics of motion event expression in Korean
  • 3. The present study
  • 4. Data and analysis
  • 5. Results
  • 6. Summary and discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 6. Cross-linguistic variation in children’s multimodal utterances
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Gesture and language development: General milestones
  • 3. Cross-linguistic variation in adult multimodal utterances
  • 4. Cross-linguistic variation in children’s multimodal utterances
  • 5. Conclusions
  • References
• Chapter 7. Gesture and speech in adults’ and children’s narratives: A cross-linguistic investigation of Zulu and French
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Method
  • 3. Results
  • 4. Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendices
• Part II. Variation in input and contexts during acquisition
• Chapter 8. Conversational partners and common ground: Variation contributes to language acquisition
  • How much interactive language are children exposed to early on?
  • Consequences of differences in amount of interaction
  • Common ground
  • Conversational partners
  • Common ground for adult and child
  • Adding conversational partners
  • How do speakers establish a starting point?
  • How do speakers add new information to existing common ground?
  • Assessing what the other knows
  • Linguistic devices for signaling given and new
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 9. Invariance in variation: Frequency and neighbourhood density as predictors of vocabulary size
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Theoretical background
  • 3. Method
  • 4. Results
  • 5. Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
• Chapter 10. New perspectives on input-output dynamics: Example from the emergence of the Noun category
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Data and coding
  • 3. Initial analyses: Frequencies of the noun constructions in the three corpora
  • 4. The mathematical model
  • 5. Modeling analyses: Relations between child speech and CDS in the three corpora
  • 6. Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix
• Chapter 11. Referential features, speech genres and activity types
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Referring expressions in a French corpus
  • 3. Referring expressions, activities and speech genres in family dialogues
  • 4. How can speech genres affect the acquisition and use of referring expressions?
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
• Chapter 12. Development of discourse competence: Spatial descriptions and narratives in L1 French
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The Database – communicative tasks and discourse types
  • 3. Construction of narratives and descriptions: Similarities in the development of discourse competence
  • 4. Construction of narratives and descriptions: Task influence on the development of discourse capacity
  • 5. Discussion and conclusions
  • References
• Chapter 13. Texting by 12-year-olds: Features shared with spoken language
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Method
  • 3. Results
  • 4. Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix. Translation of text messages into traditional French and English
• Part III. Variation in types of acquisition and types of learners
• Chapter 14. A unified model of first and second language learning
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Three frameworks
  • 3. Risk factors and support factors
  • 4. Summary
  • References
• Chapter 15. On-line sentence processing in simultaneous French/Swedish bilinguals
  • Introduction
  • 1. Sentence processing in the Competition Model
  • 2. Selected characteristics of French and Swedish
  • 3. Main factors of cue cost
  • 4. Previous results on cue cost in French and Swedish monolinguals
  • 5. Method
  • 6. Cue cost in simultaneous French /Swedish bilinguals
  • 7. Discussion and concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
• Chapter 16. The blossoming of negation in gesture, sign and oral productions
  • Introduction
  • 1. Literature review and research issues
  • 2. Data and method
  • 3. Results per child
  • 4. Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 17. Motion expression in children’s acquisition of French Sign Language
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Space across languages
  • 3. Methodology
  • 4. Background: Previous results in spoken English and French
  • 5. Results in LSF
  • 6. Discussion
  • 7. Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix. Stimuli
• Chapter 18. Early predictors of language development in Autism Spectrum Disorder
  • 1. Language in Autism Spectrum Disorder
  • 2. Predictors of language outcomes in toddlers with ASD
  • 3. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 19. Spoken and written narratives from French- and English-speaking children with Language Impairment
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The narrative study
  • 3. Analysis and results
  • 4. Discussion
  • 5. Language, modality, and Language Impairment
  • References
  • Appendix A. Complex sentence types and their weighted score
• Chapter 20. Non-literal language comprehension: Brain damage and developmental perspectives
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Indirect request comprehension in adults with right-hemisphere damage and adults with traumatic brain injury
  • 3. Request comprehension in children and adolescents with frontal lesions
  • 4. Conclusion
  • References
• Language index
• Subject index