Regularizing Unpredictable Variation: Evidence from a Natural Language Setting

While previous sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that children faithfully acquire probabilistic input constrained by sociolinguistic and linguistic factors (e.g., gender and socioeconomic status), research suggests children regularize inconsistent input—probabilistic input that is not sociolinguistically constrained (e.g., Hudson Kam & Newport, 2005, 2009; Singleton & Newport, 2004). The current study extends this research to investigate how children acquire grammatical forms when they are exposed to inconsistent input at the community-wide level by investigating the acquisition of inconsistently produced gender in Fering, a dialect of North Frisian. The results of a gender elicitation task show that some children regularize inconsistently produced features, while others approximated the adult-like probability patterns in their input. Those children who approximated the adult-like patterns were exposed to more Fering input than their peers who regularized gender. These results highlight the importance of input quantity in the context of community-wide inconsistent input, and demonstrate that when given sufficient input, children can acquire inconsistent patterns in the input.