Lexical and syllabic patterns in phonological acquisition

Abstract

Following Ferguson & Farwell (1975), this paper looks at phonological development in lexical terms and extends their method to consideration of syllables within words. Ferguson & Farwell dealt with word-initial consonants only; we attempt to determine whether the sets of phone classes in all positions are the same, whether differences that occur from position to position are primarily within the phone class or in the number and distribution of phone classes at each level in the tree, and what effect position in the syllable has on phone classes.