Although syntactic variation is ubiqitous in language use, and is well-researched by means of corpuslinguistic and psycholinguistic methods, shedding light on the various factors that determine the choice of one syntactic variantover another, very little is known how young children and adolescents learn the complex system behind this variation. The present project focuses on intricate types of syntactic variation in Dutch, such as the word order variation in verb clusters and the so-called dative alternation. It will employ both corpuslinguistic and experimental methods to trace the preferences of children in the various stages of their development as well as the underlying internalized system which guides them in choosing between different alternatives. This project will thus contribute to the relatively recent field of sociolinguistic developmental linguistics.