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Abstract

Spontaneous child language data are often extremely variable: the same child may utter words in many different ways even during the same session (within child variation) and children often differ in the way they produce particular structures (across child variation), leading to different learning paths for different children. This paper focuses on across child variation and discusses three phenomena, previously studied in isolation: the acquisition of complex word-initial clusters, the acquisition of word-final consonant clusters and the acquisition of manner of articulation features. After briefly summarizing the main findings reported in previous research based on the Dutch CLPF (Clara Levelt – Paula Fikkert) corpus of longitudinal language production data of twelve monolingual Dutch children, we report on our investigation of the various developmental patterns regarding the three phenomena, arguing that the different learning paths are at least in part dependent on each other and reveal the use of different learning strategies.