ABSTRACT
Research on child language development generally proceeds under the assumption that the adults of a speech community have a language system that the children of the community gradually acquire. The researchers investigate the path of progress toward the assumed adult target system and relate their empirical findings to the conceptual framework they bring to the study. Thus, structural phonologists have tended to find phonemes, distinctive features, and distributional constraints in phonological development, and generative phonologists have found unique lexical representations and phonological rules operating on them. Such model-influenced findings may contribute to the understanding of processes involved in phonological development as well as to improvement in models of adult phonology; however, the present paper does not start with a theoretical model and apply it to child phonology. Instead, it is written from the perspective of examining striking phenomena in the acquisition of phonology in order to proceed toward the construction of models of phonology or of speech perception and production.
