Background

I assume that humans have as one module of the mind/brain a faculty of language in the sense of Chomsky (e.g. 2000). The domain of this module is knowledge of language: more specifically of ‘I-language’ – the individual's internalised knowledge of his or her mother tongue. As an idealisation characteristic of all scientific endeavour, this module, which is a psychological construct, can be treated independently of other cognitive systems and can itself be broken down into a number of sub-systems. That is, the language faculty has internal structure such that it makes sense, for the sake of theoretical investigation, to isolate language from memory, morality and music, and phonology from syntax, morphology and semantics (see Chomsky, passim; Hauser et al., 2002; Smith, N. V., 2004; Carruthers, 2006, 2008). On these assumptions phonology constitutes a natural sub-part of the study of I-language, and one area of phonological investigation is devoted to studying the acquisition of phonological knowledge by the child exposed to primary linguistic data from the ambient language.

The traditional formulation has it that this module consists of two components: a lexicon and a computational system (CHL – the Computation for Human Language).The lexicon consists of entries which relate LF (logical form) to PF (phonetic form): more accurately, representations of meaning to representations of sound (or sign). The computational system comprises the syntax and the phonology, which together use these entries to build up paired representations of the meaning and pronunciation of sentences.