ABSTRACT
Any theory of language development, whether emergentist or nativist, must address the child’s phonological development. A child’s pronunciation of words is often quite different from an adult’s, in a way that does not obviously reflect the phonological system of the target adult language, but which makes sense from a cross-linguistic perspective on the phonological systems of adult languages in general. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the phenomena of phonological development and sketch how they can be accounted for within the Optimality Theory variant of Bernhardt and Stemberger (1998). We argue that the main mechanisms within this approach (constraints) are almost certainly emergentist in nature.
