5 - The nature of the acquisition of phonology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
Summary
All children are different, even – perhaps especially – father and son, but when it comes to language acquisition all seem to accomplish comparable tasks in roughly comparable time-frames. On the basis of my study of A, I made some fairly detailed and explicit claims and predictions about how children acquire phonology. I now look at the extent to which the study of Z constitutes a corroboration or a refutation of those claims.
As outlined in chapter 2, the main claims of APh were that the child's acquisition of phonology was rule-governed; his lexical representations were largely equivalent to the adult surface forms, which were related to his own pronunciation by an ordered series of realisation rules and phonetic detail rules. These rules conspired to bring about certain results and jointly helped to define his competence, but the child had no system of his own. These claims gave rise to a model in which perception played a minimal role, but this position was modified in the light of criticism and reanalysis to give a model which allocated an important, if minor, role to the child's perceptual abilities.
Several decades of research by others, together with my own revisiting of the terrain in the form of my study of Z, has reinforced some of these claims but has triggered a revision or reconceptualisation of others. The main conclusions can be summarised as in (1–3), each of whose sub-parts will be illustrated and justified in the following sections.
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- Information
- Acquiring PhonologyA Cross-Generational Case-Study, pp. 101 - 126Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009