Patterns in Child Phonology

Abstract

This book aims to give an overview of patterns observed in the development of phonology. Children acquiring a variety of languages show amazing similarities, and interesting differences, in their phonological development. This books aims to describe such typical patterns, on the basis of existing studies, and to give an explanation for the curious parallels across the globe on the basis of a consideration of various phonological and developmental theories. The book consists of eight chapters: (1) ‘‘Universal Patterns’’; (2) ‘‘Strategies’’; (3) ‘‘Linguistic Models’’; (4) ‘‘The Earliest Stages’’; (5) ‘‘Non-Linguistic Perspectives’’; (6) ‘‘Towards Production’’; (7)’’ Patterns within Patterns’’; and (8) ‘‘Concluding Remarks’’. Before the first chapter, a chart of consonant and vowel symbols as used in the International Phonetic Alphabet appears. There are two appendices: the first gives the sources for all example words used in the book, and the second gives a number of informal definitions of some of the linguistic terms that are used. The first chapter, ‘‘Universal Patterns’’, presents a number of phenomena that are commonly found in child language, or rather child phonology. Among these are the tendency to reduplicate (i.e. to double) a syllable, e.g. [nene] for French nez, ‘‘nose’’, [dada] for English daddy—the fact that reduplication is widespread in child phonology is nicely illustrated by presenting similar examples from Jordanian Arabic, Mandarin Chinese (for Chinese, unfortunately, the tones are omitted, just as stress marks are mostly omitted from examples in stress languages), German, Japanese, Maltese, Russian, Swedish, Zuni and Catalan. The original sources for the examples are given in an appendix (appendix 1) to avoid too many references; in some cases, data from different sources are combined in one example. This brings the slight