Acquiring phonology: A cross-generational case study by Neil Smith (review)

This is the second of two books on phonological acquisition that Neil Smith has authored. The first, The acquisition of phonology: A case study (1973), documented the linguistic development of his eldest son, Amahl (A). The present work documents the linguistic development of his son’s eldest son, Zachary (Z), in which Smith uses theoretical advancements in the field to reinterpret previous data and to compare it cross-generationally. From the beginning, Smith admits to the possible limitations of his work but makes no apologies for the ‘old school’ system of diary study he uses as it, too, holds descriptive validity that can be extended to inform theory.

Smith assumes the Chomskyan view of the language faculty and language acquisition, in terms of its innateness, and adopts the Principles and Parameters framework. Departing from Chomsky, however, he maintains that any theory of phonological acquisition that aspires to achieve “psychological reality” must deliberately avoid using rule ordering so as to limit the number of possible learnability issues that accompany processing problems. It is worth noting that Smith does not do away with phonological rules altogether; rather he advocates for the lack of rule ordering in child language acquisition, which places this book in contrast with his first title on the topic.

In the first chapter, Smith explores aspects of phonological acquisition that can be explained in terms of perceptual and motor maturity and gives a quick rundown of the linguistic development timeline. The author also reviews key concepts such as competence and performance, levels of adequacy, levels of representations and their units, learnability, universals, innateness, and continuity.

The second chapter focuses on Smith’s past findings, which used a rule-based framework. His major claims were that by the time children begin to speak, their lexical representations must be identical to that of the adult surface forms the children are receiving as input, and that, because of this, children do not have their own phonological system. Instead, he claimed that the child’s perceptual processes filter the received adult production to yield the child’s mental representation. This representation is then converted by a smaller set of rules to yield the child’s pronunciation. His argument for the child focusing on and manipulating adult language representations comes from three areas: the child’s ability to identify contrasts in the adult language that the child did not produce himself/herself, the child’s understanding of his/her own speech, and his/her grammatical (morphological) behavior (p. 22). In the third chapter, Smith explores a wider range of theories, contrasting the pros and cons of rule-based theories, parameter setting models, constraint-based theories, and usage-based theories.

Chapter 4 outlines Smith’s grandson’s linguistic development in 13 stages, beginning with babbling at 6 1/2 months and progressing all the way up to 4 years. Smith uses unordered rules to formalize any apparent irregularities in production at each stage within a generative framework, using “quasi-phonemic representations and distinctive features where appropriate” (p. 51). Some cross-generational comparisons with respect to A’s and Z’s phonemic inventory development and acquired rules are also discussed in this chapter.

More cross-generational comparisons are made in chapter 5. Smith also discusses the ways in which his own ideas of phonological acquisition have changed since his first study. For example, he still believes that a child’s linguistic performance is rule-governed, but he describes this as strictly a matter of performance, or malperformance, and not a reflection of the child’s competence. Other departures from his previous work on the topic are the amalgamation of realization rules and phonetic detail rules to one neural network, and a lack of ordering of those rules.

Chapter 6 lists Z’s lexicon diachronically and is organized in alphabetical order by word entry and cross-referenced with recording session number. Chapter 7 is an appendix that includes Z...