ABSTRACT
Linguistic research in child phonology of the past decade or more has been dominated by two central ideas about children: First, that the child is largely a passive organism in which development unfolds; and, second, that the child is simply a scaled-down version of the adult. Both ideas stem largely from the presumption of universals of language and acquisition (e.g ., Chomsky 1965, 1980a,b). Because the phonology of a child was assumed to be quantitatively simpler than that of the adult and, at least in the early stages, universally the same across languages, linguists looked to child phonology to answer questions of interest to linguistic theory. Generally, the formalisms of linguistic theory were adopted for the analysis of child data and in large part dictated not only the questions of interest but also the methods of data collection and analysis. In short, the focus of these analyses was on purely linguistic regularities in the child corpus.
