The Handbook of English Pronunciation

19Acquisition of the English Sound System

MARILYN MAY VIHMAN

Early studies of child language

The earliest publications to address phonological development were diary studies by European scholars. These culminated in Jakobson’s attempt to build a grand model of the “universal and constant laws” that might govern the process (Jakobson 1949: 378). English played only a small part in these theoretical beginnings. However, in the past 40 years of intensive acquisition research inspired by Chomsky’s (1965) strong nativist claims, data from children acquiring English have heavily dominated the field. This makes it particularly interesting to ask what the specific characteristics of English phonology are from a developmental point of view, since English has implicitly served as a kind of general model for acquisition (see the “universal tendencies … or constraints” proposed by Smith (1973: 206) on the basis of his generative-rule-based study of his son Amahl’s acquisition of English).

Fortunately, cross-linguistic studies of both perceptual processing and early word production have become so much more common in the past 10 or 20 years that it is now possible to place the acquisition of English in a broader framework, in which the pervasive individual differences across children can be weighed against the typological evidence to identify those aspects of the ambient language that most clearly affect early infant language development. At the same time, such a framework allows us to separate ...