Language acquisition researchers have long observed that childrens early use of grammatical morphemes is highly variable. It is generally thought that this is due to incomplete syntactic or semantic representations. However, recent crosslinguistic research has found that the variable production of grammatical morphemes such as articles and verbal inflections is phonologically conditioned. Thus, children are more likely to produce grammatical morphemes in simple phonological contexts than in those that are more complex. This suggests that some of the variability in childrens early production of grammatical morphemes may be due to incomplete phonological representations, and that childrens syntactic/semantic representations may be more advanced than often assumed. This raises important theoretical and methodological issues for studying the acquisition of syntax. Implications for language processing, the perception-production gap, and a developmental model of language production, are discussed.
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