The role of the word in phonological development

The task facing the child in segmenting the speech chain is an important factor in phonological development, though it has long been overlooked by theories which attempt to account for the constraints operating on the child's phonological system. Before the child can begin to determine which phonetic features function to distinguish words, it must isolate at least some words from the stream of speech. This suggests that the child will attend first to those phonetic features which serve as cues to word boundaries. As its word store increases and the problem of identifying words in the syntagm declines, such syntagmatically relevant features may give way in importance to features which are paradigmatically contrastive. An analysis of the features which children's early word forms and children's word confusions typically share with their targets provides support for the hypothesis that different features of the word are prominent at different stages of development. Over the last ten or so years, a number of models of children's phonological systems have been proposed. These models all seek to account for the deviations from adult forms which have been observed in children's production of lexical items. They differ from one another in the explanations they offer, which may invoke limitations on perception, or production, or underlying representations, or on the form of the rules for realising underlying representations. But they have one feature in common: almost without exception, they focus on the emergence of paradigmatic contrasts in the child's phonological system, taking syntagmatic context into account only in so far as it affects paradigmatic contrasts in phonological processes like assimilation. Clearly, knowing the set of phonological features which serve to distinguish minimal pairs is an important component of the adult's phonological competence and hence an important goal in acquiring that Linguistics 17 (1979), 591-610. © Mouton Publishers.