On the Acquisition of Phonological Contrasts

Many discussions of language acquisition at some point include the phrase ‘Jakobson...proposed’, or ‘following Jakobson’. In keeping with this tradition, let me begin by observing that Jakobson, Fant and Halle (1952) proposed that listeners distinguish phonemes by making a series of ordered binary choices that correspond to the oppositions active in their language. For example, suppose we hear [ ] in a language in which this is a phoneme. One possible way of ordering the series of binary choices might be as follows:

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