Templates in Early Phonological Development

Abstract

Child language data are notoriously noisy. Children may produce several phonetic variants for a given word or use the same forms for several different words. As such, child data are characterized by little apparent systematicity. Competing theories have arisen to account for a range of problematic phenomena, but each has struggled to relate child and adult phonology. Pulling together interdisciplinary findings, this research crafts a usage-based theory of early phonological acquisition by uniting a whole-word approach to representation, schema theory, and dynamic systems theory. As an investigation of developing representational processes, this study examines production data collected at the onset of word production from four children acquiring American English. Cross-linguistic evidence for the primacy of phonological representation shaped by the whole word (i.e., template) in early acquisition has been reported, but questions about template function motivate closer scrutiny. As a supporting framework, schema theory conceives of schematic categories mapped hierarchically, defined by varying degrees of abstraction. Dynamic systems theory serves as a connecting framework, capable of describing the tenuous stability of phonological behaviors developing in continuous time. Two major analytical steps comprise this research. The first entails analysis of each child’s lexical development in connection with templatic behavior. Analysis reveals points of prominent template use in relationship with other linguistic changes. The second analytical step places templatic patterns within schematic networks, facilitating a visual depiction of emerging representation as a phonological system gains in complexity. The union of the templatic approach with schema theory and dynamic systems theory offers a novel approach to early acquisition data. This research importantly contributes to our limited knowledge of early phonological acquisition processes. It highlights idiosyncrasy in developmental paths across children and also the importance of conditions present at the inception of a phonological system for being able to see how each path takes shape.