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. Evidence for active selection and avoidance of words with a particular structure was-with the documentation of widespread individual differences in phonology acquisition-one of the earliest findings that indicated the active role of the child during acquisition. The most striking evidence for the creativity of the child comes from cases where children produce segments or word patterns for which there is no distinct model in the adult language. Universalist theorists assume the acquisition process to be constrained by innately given principles that affect an orderly progress of improvement toward the adult model. Linguistically oriented research on phonological development has generally been focused on a proposed universal order of acquisition of phonemes or oppositions.
