Constraints in Phonological Acquisition

René Kager is Associate Professor of Language Development at Utrecht University. His books include A Metrical Theory of Stress and Destressing in Dutch (1989), The Prosody-Morphology Interface (with H. van der Hulst and W. Zonneveld, Cambridge 1999) and Optimality Theory (Cambridge, 1999). Joe Pater is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has published in a number of journals including Phonology, Language Acquisition and the Journal of Child Language. Wim Zonneveld is Professor of Linguistics and Phonology at Utrecht University. He is the author of A Formal Theory of Exceptions in Generative Phonology (1978), Klemtoon & Metrische Fonologie (with M. Trommelen, Couthinho, 1989) and Prosody-Morphology Interface (with R. Kager and H. van der Hulst, Cambridge 1999).

'… the volume has already achieved considerable success … this volume is a must for anyone working in the area of phonological acquisition or optimality theory … the volume would also make an excellent textbook for a graduate course …' Journal of Phonology

• List of contributors; Preface; 1. Introduction René Kager, Joe Pater and Wim Zonneveld; 2. Saving the baby: making sure that old data survive new theories Lise Menn; 3. Markedness and faithfulness constraints in child phonology Amalia Gnanadesikan; 4. Input elaboration, head faithfulness and evidence for representation in the acquisition of left-edge clusters in West Germanic Heather Goad and Yvan Rose; 5. Phonological acquisition in Optimality Theory: the early stages Bruce Hayes; 6. Syllable types in cross-linguistic and developmental grammars Clara C. Levelt and Ruben van de Vijver; 7. Bridging the gap between receptive and productive development with minimally violable constraints Joe Pater; 8. Learning phonotactic distributions Alan Prince and Bruce Tesar; 9. Emergence of Universal Grammar in foreign word adaptions Shigeko Shinohara; 10. The initial and final states: theoretical implications and experimental explorations of Richness of the Base Paul Smolensky, Lisa Davidson and Peter Jusczyk; 11. Child word stress competence: an experimental approach Wim Zonneveld and Dominique Nouveau.