Introduction: the emergence of phonology: whole-word approaches, cross-linguistic evidence

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Whole-word phonology is a particular approach to early phonological development. This volume is designed to bring together the classic papers which gave rise to it in the 1970s and current studies that build on and extend the model, which in essence took an emergentist and usage-based stance before its time; the book will make no attempt to cover other approaches to phonological development in any systematic way. Many of the papers, including Vihman and Croft (2007, this volume, Chapter 2), with which we begin, use the term “template” to refer to child-specific word patterns identifiable within the first year of word use. Templates, referred to sporadically in the earlier developmental literature (e.g.,Menn 1983, this volume, Chapter 6) and given formal status for adult linguistic analyses in Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1995), are a more focused expression of the ideas formulated by Waterson (1971, this volume, Chapter 3), Ferguson and Farwell (1975, this volume, Chapter 4), and Macken (1979, this volume, Chapter 5), which provided the core of the whole-word phonology idea (see Vihman and Croft 2007, this volume, Chapter 2, for a summary of the basic arguments). This volume is restricted to the study of early word production and the phonological patterning that can be seen in that domain. The year in which the first of our “setting papers” was written – Waterson (1971, this volume, Chapter 3) – also marks the year of publication of the first study of infant speech perception (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, andVigorito 1971). Since then, perception studies have solidly documented infants’ remarkable early discriminatory capacities and the rapid advances in knowledge of the ambient language that follow over the first year of life (see Jusczyk 1997; Kuhl 2004; and Vihman forthcoming 2014 for reviews), while numerous studies demonstrating infant statistical learning (in language and other areas) from an early age have expanded our understanding of the learning mechanism that may underlie those advances (see Thiessen and Saffran 2007, and Johnson and Tyler 2010 for alternative positions on the role of statistical learning; Vihman forthcoming 2014: ch. 5 provides an overview). In addition, several distinct methodological procedures have been used to trace and explore the nature of early word-form learning over the first two years of life. The resultant studies are of evident relevance to phonological development but none are included here, as the addition of even a few would result in a far