Child Phonology

Book excerpt: Child Phonology, Volume 1: Production contains the proceedings of a conference on child phonology held at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 28-31, 1978. The conference provided a forum for discussing theoretical and methodological issues concerning child phonology, with emphasis on speech production and perception as well as the relationship between the two. Different perspectives on how children acquire the phonology of their language(s) are considered. Comprised of 13 chapters, this volume begins with an overview of speech production in children, followed by a discussion on the control of speech production by adults. The reader is then introduced to a philosophical consideration of the theory of child phonology; the development of auditory and articulatory phonological processes in children; and stages of speech development in the first year of life. Subsequent chapters focus on the emergence of the sounds of speech in infancy; a cross-linguistic perspective on the acquisition of stop systems; and the acquisition of word-initial fricatives and affricates in English by children aged 2-6 years. The book also explores the role of context in misarticulations before concluding with an analysis of the acquisition of tone. This monograph will be of interest to phonologists and linguists.