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The central assertion in this volume is that the young child uses general skills, scaffolded by adults, to acquire the complex knowledge of sound patterns and the goal-directed behaviors for communicating ideas through language and producing speech. A child's acquisition of phonology is seen as a product of her physical and social interaction capacities supported by input from adult models about ambient language sound patterns. Acquisition of phonological knowledge and behavior is a product of this function-oriented complex system. No pre-existing mental knowledge base is necessary for acquiring phonology in this view. Importantly, the child's diverse abilities are used for many other functions as well as phonological acquisition. Throughout, an evaluation is made of the research on patterns of typical development across languages in monolingual and bilingual children and children with speech impairments affecting various aspects of their developing complex system. Also considered is the status of available theoretical perspectives on phonological acquisition relative to an emergence proposal, and contributions that this perspective could make to more comprehensive modeling of the nature of phonological acquisition are proposed. The volume will be of interest to cognitive psychologists, linguistics, and speech pathologists.

This study shows that a corpus of proto-word forms shares four sequential sound patterns with words of modern languages and the first words of infants. Three of the patterns involve intrasyllabic consonant-vowel (CV) co-occurrence: labial (lip) consonants with central vowels, coronal (tongue front) consonants with front vowels, and dorsal (tongue back) consonants with back vowels. The fourth pattern is an intersyllabic preference for initiating words with a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant sequence (LC). The CV effects may be primarily biomechanically motivated. The LC effect may be self-organizational, with multivariate causality. The findings support the hypothesis that these four patterns were basic to the origin of words.

The purpose of the current study was to revisit a controversial topic: whether frequencies of phonological consonant and vowel classes differ in speech directed to children and to adults. In addition, the current study investigated whether the frequency of phonological consonant and vowel classes changes with children’s increasing chronological and/or developmental age. This study analyzed speech input from 44 adults to four different age groups of listeners (i.e., three groups of children at 6, 18, and 36 months of age and one group of adult listeners) in terms of frequency of occurrence of consonant and vowel classes. Results revealed that consonant stop, nasal, fricative and glide manner classes as well as all four consonant place classes were significantly different in speech directed to the four different age groups. A perspective is discussed to better understand the nature of frequency input of phonological sound classes.

Purpose: Consonant repetitions within words are a well-attested speech error pattern in children's early speech acquisition. We investigated the role of intervening vowel context in understanding speech forms containing consonant repetitions in early words. Intrasyllabic consonant-vowel (CV) sequences within consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) and consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) forms containing consonant repetitions were analyzed to evaluate whether children's lack of independent movement control for the tongue in word-level sequences might contribute to these observed speech patterns. Method: Spontaneous speech data produced by 10 typically developing children learning American English were analyzed longitudinally from the onset of word use to 36 months. Overall patterns and word shape effects for nine CV combinations occurring in their CVC and CVCV word shapes that contained repeated nonadjacent consonants and the intervening vowel were analyzed. Results: Three CV combinations--coronal-front vowel, labial-central vowel, and dorsal-back vowel--occurred at above-chance levels. Preference for these CV patterns was strong in CVCV but not in CVC word shapes. These CV combinations occurred frequently at all time periods analyzed for CVCV's while decreasing across time for CVC's. Conclusions: Analysis of intrasyllabic patterns within word forms containing consonant repetitions revealed that consonant repetitions in many early words occurred at above-chance levels in the context of articulatorily compatible vowels. Results suggest that children's production system capacities are an important contributing principle accounting for vowel context effects within word forms containing consonant repetitions during earliest speech acquisition.

The goal of this study was to investigate non-adjacent consonant sequence patterns in target words during the first-word period in infants learning American English. In the spontaneous speech of eighteen participants, target words with a Consonant–Vowel–Consonant (C1VC2) shape were analyzed. Target words were grouped into nine types, categorized by place of articulation (labial, coronal, dorsal) of initial and final consonants (e.g. mom, labial–labial; mat, labial–coronal; dog, coronal–dorsal). The results indicated that some consonant sequences occurred much more frequently than others in early target words. The two most frequent types were coronal–coronal (e.g. dad) and labial–coronal (e.g. mat). The least frequent type was dorsal–dorsal (e.g. cake). These patterns are consistent with phonotactic characteristics of English and infants' production capacities reported in previous studies. This study demonstrates that infants' expressive vocabularies reflect both ambient language characteristics and their own production capacities, at least for consonant sequences in C1VC2 word forms.

This study compared segmental distribution patterns for consonants and vowels in English infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS). A previous study of Korean indicated that segmental patterns of IDS differed from ADS patterns (Lee, Davis & MacNeilage, 2008). The aim of the current study was to determine whether such differences in Korean are universal or language-specific. Results indicate that consonant distribution patterns of English IDS were significantly different from English ADS. Speakers who used IDS produced fewer fricatives, affricates, nasals and liquids, but more stops and glides, than speakers who used ADS. In terms of vowels, IDS speakers produced more high-back vowels /u Ʊ/ and /ɔI/ diphthongs than ADS speakers. These results indicate both general trends and language-specific segmental distribution patterns in IDS. When compared to previous findings on ADS and IDS in Korean, these results for English give support to a more general assertion that segmental distribution patterns in IDS seem to be mediated by linguistic and cultural factors across languages.

Segmental distributions of Korean infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) were compared. Significant differences were found in both consonant and vowel patterns. Korean-speaking mothers using IDS displayed more frequent labial consonantal place and less frequent coronal and glottal place and fricative manner. They showed more use of mid and low central vowels in IDS as well as more use of language-specific Korean phonemes. Mothers produced significantly more fortis and geminate and less lenis consonant phonemes in IDS than in ADS. Findings suggest that Korean mothers speaking to infants in the IDS speech style use sounds that more closely match infant production propensities as well as highlighting perceptually salient properties. IDS may serve to facilitate infant learning of ambient language phonological regularities.

Some researchers have suggested that young children choose to say mainly words containing sounds they can produce and avoid words with sounds they find difficult to produce. This proposed pattern of ‘selection’ supports a hypothesis of dominance of phonological factors in words children choose to say. Based on longitudinal spontaneous data samples during their first 50 word period, word-based tokens produced by two English and two French monolingual children were analyzed. Token frequencies in spontaneously produced word targets (SW-T) were compared to children's actual productions (SW-A) of those target words to understand relationships between targets children choose to say and their patterns in actual productions, (i.e., to evaluate the presence of ‘selection’). Place of articulation (i.e., labial, coronal and dorsal) in initial word position within CV, CVC, and CVCV word forms was compared. Analysis of spontaneous output in daily interactions in children learning two languages with differing phonological systems enables a more general evaluation of issues related to the interface of phonological and lexical aspects during the earliest period of language acquisition. Un certain nombre de chercheurs ont suggéré que les jeunes enfants choisiraient de dire principalement des mots contenant des sons qu'ils peuvent produire et d’éviter les mots avec des sons qu'ils trouvent difficiles à produire. Cette possibilité de « sélection » consolide l'hypothèse de la dominance des facteurs phonologiques sur les mots que les enfants choisissent de dire. À partir de données spontanées longitudinales recueillies durant la période des 50 premiers mots, les occurrences de mots produits par deux enfants monolingues anglophones et deux enfants monolingues francophones ont été analysées. Les fréquences d'occurrences des mots cibles produits spontanément (SW-T) ont été comparées aux formes réellement produites par les enfants (SW-A) pour ces cibles, afin de comprendre les relations entre les cibles et les formes effectivement produites (c'est-à-dire évaluer la présence ou l'absence de « sélection »). En position initiale de mot, le lieu d'articulation (c'est-à-dire labial, coronal ou dorsal) a été examiné dans les formes de mot CV, CVC et CVCV. L'analyse des productions spontanées dans les interactions quotidiennes, chez des enfants monolingues de deux langues différentes, qui ont des systèmes phonologiques différents, permet une estimation plus générale des questions liées à l'interface entre les aspects phonologiques et lexicaux pendant la période la plus précoce de l'acquisition du langage.