ABSTRACT
The sound system of each child's speech has its own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, as does the sound system of an individual speaker of any age. Data for the descriptions which follow will be drawn mainly from the transcription made of the children's responses to the Phonological Imitation Test (PIT) and the Imitation Test (Words) (IT(W)), with occasional reference to the Imitation Test (Sentences) (IT(S)) and other tests. The analytic procedure was straightforward. The phonetic difference between plain and ejective consonants was always clear in Alberto's speech, but five times in the IT(W) he substituted a plain stop for its ejective counterpart or vice versa. Two of these substitutions resulted in violations of the first two morpheme-structure constraints. Syllable-final nasals in phrase-medial position were invariably assimilated to the point of articulation of the following syllable-initial consonant, even in those cases where the adult norm would disallow it.
