THE ROLE OF THE WORD IN PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

The task facing the child in segmenting the speech chain is an important factor in phonological development, though it has long been overlooked by theories which attempt to account for the constraints operating on the child’s phonological system. Before the child can begin to determine which phonetic features function to distinguish words, it must isolate at least some words from the stream of speech. This suggests that the child will attend first to those phonetic features which serve as cues to word boundaries. As its word store increases and the problem of identifying words in the syntagm declines, such syntagmatically relevant features may give way in importance to features which are paradigmatically contrastive. An analysis of the features which children’s early word forms and children’s word confusions typically share with their targets provides support for the hypothesis that different features of the word are prominent at different stages of development. © Mouton Publishers.