Phonological templates in early words

Both formalists and functionalists have proposed that universal phonetic or phonological principles govern early word production, yet the wide range of individual differences in this period continues to resist coherent formulation in such terms, even across children acquiring a single language. This study explores the extent of withinand between-language similarities and differences in phonological patterning, with the goal of arriving at a better understanding of the extent to which early word patterns are universal, specific to the ambient language, or individual by child. It is based on analysis of the word forms of 33 children acquiring one of five languages (English, Finnish, French, Italian, Welsh), drawn from language samples taken at the end of the single word period. Segmental inventories were similar across language groups, while the word shapes produced showed an ambient language effect. Individual children responded to the challenges of difficult segments or segmental sequences and long words in different ways, each of them basing their word forms on selected word shapes or ‘templates’ to which some adult targets are then ‘adapted’. We see both similarities and differences in early word forms as rooted in the learning process itself, which provides the basis for emergent phonological organization.