Phonological acquisition in Optimality Theory: the early stages

Abstract

The study of phonological acquisition at the very earliest stages is making notable progress. Virtuosic experimental work accessing the linguistic knowledge of infants has yielded extraordinary findings demonstrating the precocity of some aspects of acquisition. Moreover, phonologists now possess an important resource, Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993), which permits theorising to relate more closely to the findings of experimental work. The purpose of this chapter is to outline one way in which these experimental and theoretical research lines can be brought closer together. The central idea is that current phonological theory can, without essential distortion, be assigned an architecture that conforms closely to the process of acquisition as it is observed in children. I conclude with a speculative, though reasonably comprehensive, picture of how phonological acquisition might proceed.