Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
When Roger Brown selected Adam, Eve and Sarah to be the first three participants in the modern study of child language, one of the criteria was the intelligibility of their speech (Brown, 1973). According to the prevailing view at the time, accuracy of pronunciation was a peripheral phenomenon that had nothing to do with the development of language qua language. So why not study children who were easy to transcribe? One reason why not, according to Stoel-Gammon (SG; this issue), is that the difficulty of accurately producing sounds influences the words children acquire and the rate at which they acquire them. (It's true that Roger Brown's focus was on the child's acquisition of morphosyntax, but articulation was assumed to be peripheral to everything back then.) This interaction between the articulatory skill of children and phonological properties of words is just one of the mutual influences between phonology and the lexicon SG describes. In her target article, SG brings together data from a wide range of investigations to build an account of how phonology and the lexicon interact in development.
Some words are acquired later than other words because they contain sounds that are more difficult for children to produce, and some children produce words earlier than other children because they are better at the motor task of word production. The evidence SG marshals in support of this account includes very recent findings and findings that have been around for a while but have never been incorporated into a larger explanatory structure. The account SG builds explains why children around the world are more likely to say something that sounds like mama rather than something that sounds like mother or madre as their first word and why mothers who provide labels like pee-pee instead of urinate aren't all wrong in their tacit theories. SG also brings under this explanatory umbrella Tardif's proposal (Tardif, Fletcher, Liang & Kaciroti, 2009) that phonological differences may explain why some languages seem to be acquired more rapidly by children than others (see also Bleses, this issue).
In Roger Brown's analysis of the order of syntactic development in Adam, Eve and Sarah, he sought clues to the mechanisms that underlie language acquisition. It is worth asking...