doi:10.1017/S0952675710000230 Reviews

This collection of articles presents a range of results achieved by the editors and their colleagues at the Indiana University Learnability Project, including former students in that programme. The work has cumulatively produced, and benefits from, a large database of phonological disorders in 279 children aged 3 to 7. In addition to Dinnsen andGierut, there are five other contributors; all but one chapter includes at least one editor as sole or co-author. Consequently, the editors are also the main authors of the volume. Two guiding principles are that ‘anomalies in language development actually help to delineate the basic principles and properties of linguistic systems’ (p. 38), and that ‘optimality theory offers a principled explanation for the effects’ observed in treatment (p. 24). (The name of the theory (henceforth OT) is not capitalised, contrary to general practice in the field.) The longitudinal data for children before and after treatment for their phonological disorders provide particularly valuable points of comparison for constraint reranking in OT. The book begins with three chapters of background material (Part I), intended to make the remaining articles accessible to a wide range of readers. Dinnsen’s ‘Fundamentals of optimality theory’ (pp. 3–36) provides a good overview of the technical aspects of this theory; the examples are all drawn from the disordered speech that constitutes the focus of the book, and therefore provides some useful background even for those already acquainted with OT. Gierut’s ‘Phonological disorders and the Developmental Phonology Archive’ (pp. 37–92) explains the nature of the disorders studied in the book, as well as the extensive data at the Learnability Project on which the analyses are based; it includes very detailed lists of words used to probe for disordered pronunciations, and classification of deviations from the adult target form. The final background chapter, Gierut’s ‘Fundamentals of experimental design and treatment’ (pp. 93–118), lays out the sorts of experiments used to investigate disorders and their remedies, and includes details about the protocols of the project. These two chapters are useful for readers with limited experimental background, as well as those wishing to know the specific practices of the lab. Following this substantial introduction – it occupies over a hundred pages – are three sections (Parts II–IV) that focus on particular issues in phonological acquisition, and the ways in which OT can help us to understand them. Part II contains three papers on opacity in child phonologies, interesting because it differs from the common case of child speech simply being less marked than the adult target. A famous example is the chain shift in which puzzle is heard as Phonology 27 (2010) 527–531. f Cambridge University Press 2010 doi:10.1017/S0952675710000230