ABSTRACT
The infrastructural interpretation of protophones has raised theoretically and practically significant questions about potential abnormalities of development in the foundations for speech. As soon as normal protophone stages came into focus, there was interest in turning the camera toward events of environment or biology that might perturb their development. In part the special interest in possible aberrations of protophone development owes to the fact that they appear so early in life. If their progress is perturbed early, and if it is possible to detect such perturbation, then it might be possible to identify potential abnormalities long before they would otherwise be noticed: the earlier, the better. It appears that early intervention attenuates or eliminates the effects of many disorders (Guralnick, 1997; Ramey & Campbell, 1984; Resnick, Armstrong, & Carter, 1988; Robinshaw, 1995; Schweinhart, Weikart, & Larner, 1986; Yoshinaga-Itano, Sedey, Coulter, & Mehl, 1998).
