Phonological development in specific contexts: Studies of Chinese-speaking children. Zhu Hua. Cleveden, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2002, Pp. 218.

Abstract

Phonology is usually explained as the study of speech sounds and their patterns and functions in the lexical representation of speakers of languages (Kenstowicz, 1994; Spencer, 1996). Some years ago the question, “Where's phonology?” was raised by Macken (1992) in the context of the large concern with the phonetics of acquisition and the conception of phonological acquisition as acquisition of phonetics. This division between phonology and phonetics may be traced to the work of the Prague School of Trubetzkoy (1939/1969) and earlier. Macken proposed a relatively autonomous phonological component, with perceptual, articulatory, and phonological-based abstract rules and principles, to account for learners' lexical representation and suggested a hierarchy of prosodic words, segments, and features as the basis of phonological acquisition (Macken, 1979, 1992). Recent emphasis is on the interaction among phonology, phonetics, and psychology, and this integrative approach has implications for studying common crosslinguistic speech sound patterns (Ohala, 1999). Phonology is further seen as addressing the questions of rules and representations, which may apply to “compute the phonetic representation” within the framework of universal grammar (Kenstowicz, 1994, p. 10).