Words and sounds in early language acquisition

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the development of initial-consonant production in relation to the acquisition of words, and suggested a model of phonology for children to learn to deal with an enormous array of lexical and phonological elements.

Abstract: Development of initial-consonant production in relation to the acquisition of words is investigated. Longitudinal data of three children are analysed from about age 1;0 until the total recorded lexicon reaches 50 or more words. Using the word as the basis of analysis, PHONE CLASSES are set up for each child and are followed through time in PHONE TREES. As in historical sound change, both lexical and phonetic parameters are involved. Phonological idioms, saliency rules, universal order hypotheses, and acquisition strategies are discussed. Tentative suggestions are made toward a model of phonology.* In acquiring full control over the language of his speech community, the child must learn to deal with an enormous array of lexical and phonological elements, as well as with the complex relations among these elements which constitute the grammar of a particular language, different from all other possible languages. In addition to the machinery of the language itself, he must learn when and how to use the language in accordance with his own needs and the norms of the community. And all this confronts the child not in neat, separate units, but in conglomerate batches which he must largely sort out for himself. Even if the speech input to which he is exposed is restricted in scope and simplified in structure, as the talk addressed to young children tends to be, the analytic problem is severe, and it must not be expected that the child's early attempts will match with any great precision the adult's language behavior and its underlying principles of organization. Thus the linguist who wishes to identify analytic units in the child's speech encounters even greater pitfalls than he does in abstracting from the adult's speech those components at various levels which merit analytic autonomy. Looking for distinctive features, inflectional categories, syntactic rules, and all the dozens of other possible basic units in a child's linguistic system is a hazardous pastime; yet if we are to understand the processes of language development-indeed of language