The Acquisition of Phonological Inventories∗

The acquisition of phonological inventories is a subject which has been studied by both linguists and psychologists, and rightly so—there is no question from the point of view of the theoretician studying universal grammar that the path from the initial state to the adult state is of interest, and there is no question from the developmental psychologist’s point of view that the child’s phonological capacities are undergoing substantial development in the early years. Beyond similar titles, however, the linguist and the psychologist researching “phonological inventory development” traditionally have little to share, because by “inventory development” they usually mean quite different things. The tradition among linguists began with Roman Jakobson, who placed the empirical focus on the child’s improving capacities for producing sounds. For psychologists, however, the seminal work of Eimas et al. 1971 shifted the focus from observational studies of production to laboratory work in perception. Since then, there have been two different traditions, child phonology and infant speech perception, both of which use the term “inventory development,” but which have proceeded independently. With two traditions, there come two sets of received facts. Tthe received facts here both come in the form of developmental sequences, and traditional ways of understanding those developmental sequences. We begin by summarizing these traditional views of inventory development from the point of view of the linguist and the psychologist.