J. Child Lang.  (), –.

Printed in the United Kingdom

#  Cambridge University Press

BOOK REVIEWS

M. M. V, Phonological development : the origins of language in the child.

Oxford : Basil Blackwell, . Pp. xiv­.
The appearance of this volume, which is, to quote the back cover, ‘ the first
book-length survey of and introduction to the study of the child’s acquisition
of phonology ’ will be warmly welcomed by all those who teach courses and
carry out or supervise research into phonological development. An up-to-
date account of research into many facets of phonological development is
provided by a leading authority in the field, who demonstrates mastery of
both the phonetic and the psychological aspects of phonological development.
The result is that the reader is given an unexpectedly broad picture, ranging
from infant speech perception to the development of literacy.
The first two chapters set out the theoretical issues that underlie the study
of phonological development, providing a historical perspective that ranges
from Jakobson to connectionism, as well as an exposition of current
approaches. The author aligns herself with the functionalist camp, quoting
with approval Mohanan’s statement that ‘ phonological development is
pattern formation and adaptation, not knowledge discovery and deduction ’.
The consequence is that she is open to and interested in, any findings that
might throw light on the processes of development, irrespective of the
research tradition or paradigm from which the data derive.
The next two chapters focus on speech perception in the first year of life,
reflecting the proliferation of research in this area in recent years, and also its
theoretical importance : Vihman shows how the careful experimental work of
Jusczyk, Werker and others has raised fundamental issues about what it is
that children are acquiring when they acquire phonology ; and about the
developmental relationship between language specific and ‘ universal ’ fea-
tures of the acquisition process.
Chapters  and  provide a parallel account of research into speech
production. In Chapter , the focus is on infant vocalizations and babbling,
and the relationship between innate and environmental factors. The emerg-
ence of the first words, and the related emergence of phonological systemati-
city, are described in Chapter . The discussion is helpfully illustrated by
cross-linguistic data, largely drawn from the author’s own studies, presented
in three appendices.
The perception story is picked up again in Chapter , with an insightful
review of the well-known studies of ‘ phonemic ’ perception in the second and
third years of life. This is followed by a summary of more recent experiments
investigating children’s word recognition ability, compared to that of adults,
and how the development of this ability relates to vocabulary growth. The
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  
final part of the chapter considers the relationship between metaphonological
awareness and the development of literacy, weighing up the evidence as to
how much subsyllabic structure in phonological representations can be
attributed to pre-literate children.
Up to this point, the book has followed a chronological path, while at the
same time alternating between input and output. Chapter , ‘ Prosodic
development ’, breaks this pattern. We return to infancy to take up the story
of the development of pitch patterning and final lengthening – two of the
better researched aspects of what the author acknowledges has been a
neglected area. While the careful review of the literature is valuable, the
reader does not emerge with a very clear overall picture of intonational
development.
In Chapter  we return to the main story with a survey of phonological
development on the output side, from the latter part of the second year
onwards. Given that so much of the classical child phonology research is
concerned with this period the chapter is relatively short, though Vihman
successfully pinpoints the most important developmental shifts, and empha-
sizes the folly of attributing too much segmentation to the young child. She
then describes, though with tantalizing brevity, some of the most interesting
recent research: the work on the development of coarticulation, on phono-
logical processes that cross word boundaries, and on the effect of prosodic
structure on phonological and morphosyntactic output.
Disappointingly, there is no final chapter to bring the whole story to a
conclusion and suggest how the field might develop. There are some aspects
of phonological development that have been hardly touched on by re-
searchers, though they are of potential theoretical interest, and of practical
importance for children’s educational and social development. Prosody, and
specifically intonation, has already been mentioned : there has been little
work on the development of intonation beyond the first two years, and what
studies there are are not discussed in this book. Furthermore, there is no
mention of the sociolinguistic dimension to phonological development. How
does a child learn variant realizations of ‘ the same ’ phonological item, and
then learn how to deploy them for sociolinguistic purposes ? How does the
child learn to understand speakers of unfamiliar accents ? How do children
in bilingual situations learn to master two phonological systems ? How do
caregivers and children draw on the highly structured mechanisms of
conversational repair to assist the course of phonological development ?
Researchers have begun to address these questions : perhaps the next edition
of this book will be able to report their findings.
In addition to finding a wide readership among developmental psycholo-
gists and linguists, this book will almost certainly provide a standard
reference for speech and language pathologists concerned with children’s
speech disorders, who are dependent on careful descriptions of ‘ normal ’
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 
development when assessing the extent and nature of phonological impair-
ments. Given that, over the last twenty years or so, a great deal of research
has been carried out in the field of phonological impairment and disability,
it is a pity that, on the evidence of this book, the flow of information and ideas
has not also been in the reverse direction. We find little evidence of atypical
cases being used to illuminate normal development, for instance. Such a
procedure is standard in (adult) cognitive neuropsychology, and has also
been used to address developmental issues such as the development of
reading and spelling, the relationship between language and cognition, the
notion of a critical period, and the modularity of syntax and semantics. What
can we learn about normal development from studies of phonological
acquisition in deaf children, or in children who have severe peripheral speech
output difficulties (such as cleft palate), or motor difficulties (as in de-
velopmental dysarthria or dyspraxia), or learning difficulties (as in Down
syndrome) ? How does the inability to perceive or produce speech affect the
development of phonological representations, what can this tell us about the
nature of phonological representations and their development in children
without such impairments ?
These complaints are not about the book under review, but about the field
it is surveying. The book itself, which is well produced and accessibly priced,
can be highly recommended to readers looking for an authoritative and
critical account of this exciting research area, provided they already have
some grounding in phonetics and language acquisition studies.
(Received May ) Reviewed by B W
University College, London

N B, A developmental–functionalist approach to child language.

Mahwah, NJ : Erlbaum, . Pp. xii­.
This book has appeared at a timely moment in the endeavour to understand
the development of language structure in children. There is currently a
resurgence of interest in functionalist approaches both in linguistic theory
and in developmental psycholinguistics. Broadly speaking a functionalist
approach means, in linguistics, an approach which sees semantic–pragmatic
function as one, or even the most, important basis for understanding and
motivating syntactic and morphological structure. In developmental psycho-
linguistics it means seeing semantic–pragmatic function as an important
organizing principle for the child’s development of structure.
The first great push to explain the development of grammatical structure
in terms of prelinguistic communicative functions was countered by a
number of different positions all of which had in common an emphasis on the
autonomy of grammatical structure and the impossibility of simply reading
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  
from semantic–pragmatic function to the complexities of structural
distinctions made in the grammar. These criticisms came not only from
the nativist–linguistic position but from those who, while not subscribing to
the idea of a fully autonomous UG module, nevertheless drew attention to the
significance and subtlety of syntactic and morphological distinctions, es-
pecially when viewed in a crosslinguistic context (Bowerman,  ; Slobin,
). Budwig’s work derives from this position but it is joined to a
theoretical grounding in developmental psychology. This makes a good mix
– and in fact it is an essential mix if we are to be able to move forward as
developmental psycholinguists in a way that has some relation to psycho-
logical reality.
In the first chapter Budwig provides an overview of functionalist ap-
proaches to language structure both from the viewpoint of linguistics and de-
velopmental psychology. Apart from being a useful guide to research in these
fields, though inevitably missing some more recent work (e.g. Goldberg,
 ; Croft, ), she makes two important points : () that there has been
relatively little interplay between functionalist linguists who in one way or
another try to relate language structure to language function, and de-
velopmental psycholinguists who see children’s language development as
being intimately related to communicative function ; () that in child
language accounts there has often been little attempt to deal with de-
velopmental change, either in terms of explicitly defining an end-point or
telos, or in terms of change that takes place during development. Change has
sometimes been described minutely but it has been far more difficult to
conceptualize how it takes place or what drives it. Both these points are major
theoretical challenges to the field. Budwig approaches them with an empirical
study into the structure, semantics and pragmatics of young children’s
expression of self as agent.
In the second chapter Budwig examines previous work on children’s
linguistic marking of notions related to agency and control. She points out
that while many researchers have noted that children talk about agency a
great deal, when one looks closely at the data this is often in a much more
restricted way than would be implied by the fully blown notion of agent or
actor suggested in many linguistic theories or, indeed, accounts of language
development. She also observes from the developmental literature that
children’s earliest concepts of agency seem often to be restricted to self-
agency rather than a full range of causal agents. This chapter is excellent as
a review on the question of transitivity and agency but it deals rather
superficially with previous work on the development of first person pro-
nominal forms of which there is a long history (e.g. Chiat,  ; Rispoli,
).
Chapters – form the empirical study of six children’s use of self-
referring expressions. The study lasted  months and the children are
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 
divided into two groups ; a younger group of three, initially aged between  ; 
and  ;  and with MLUs in the range ±–± ; and a second group of three
older children, aged between  ;  and  ; , with MLUs in the range
±–±. The children are videotaped in two  minute sessions, one with
their mothers and the other with a peer. All recording takes place in their
daycare centre while they are engaging in a joint activity. The two groups of
children differed not only on mean age and MLU but also on the distribution
of self, other and joint reference in subject position with over  % of the first
group’s subject references being to self, while  % or less of the second
group’s subjects were self-referring. The central analyses are in terms of the
self-referring forms used in subject position in utterances with verbs and the
semantics and pragmatics of their use. The main dimension of semantic
analysis was the degree of agentivity expressed by the utterance ; while the
degree of participant control formed the major pragmatic dimension.
While the older children largely use the forms correctly in terms of the
adult language, the younger group, while often using I correctly, also use a
large number of ‘ incorrect ’ forms for self-reference e.g. me, my or own name,
in subject position at the outset of the study though seemingly ‘ correct ’ use
is all but established by  months later. This finding does not, of course,
come as a surprise, since the incorrect use of first-person forms in subject
position by young language-learners of English has been noted for many
years. However, the major claim that Budwig makes from these data is that
the younger group of children use different self-referring forms to express
systematically contrasting semantic and pragmatic meanings and that this
remains true even when the surface use of self-referring pronouns becomes
correct. The claim is, therefore, that these children are introducing into their
language distinctions that are not present in the adult language in order to
mark functional distinctions. Thus, in his early sessions, Jeremy, the child for
whom this seems clearest, uses I in subject position for utterances which are
low in agentivity and control and my for utterances high in agentivity and
control. Megan, in her early sessions, appeared to have a three-way contrast
between I, me and own name, centred around distinctions in agentivity and
levels of assertiveness and referentiality, while Grice had more overlapping
usage between I and me partly based around distinctions between whether
the child herself was attempting to bring about a change of state or wished
others to do so.
There are a number of empirical and methodological issues in these
analyses that one could argue about. The author points out that almost none
of the differences in use are absolute and suggests a sort of prototypicality
gradient in terms of which form the child will pick to express which
constellation of semantic and pragmatic functions. But for some of the
children the use of different forms for the same functions overlaps to the
point where it is quite difficult to tell whether there is a phenomenon to be
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  
explained, particularly since reliabilities were not obtained for the coding and
tests of significance were not applied.
However, it is more interesting to start from the proposition that at least
some children do fairly reliably use different self-reference forms for
different constellations of semantic–pragmatic functions and to consider the
implications of this. Being of a somewhat mechanistic disposition, I need to
know how this might work mechanically or unconsciously since no one is
suggesting that the child is doing this metacognitively. Why should children
take two or more of these forms and put them into ‘ incorrect ’ positions with
systematic differences in meaning ? Budwig attempts an explanation through
reference to Slobin’s ideas about children’s language learning systems being
initially predisposed to connect one form to one function and also relates it
to Karmiloff-Smith’s notion of plurifunctionality, suggesting that children
initially may link a particular form to a particular function overtly and then
reorganize the system into a set of plurifunctional meanings for the same
form (Karmiloff-Smith, ). Note that this explains the phenomenon in
terms of developmental processes internal to the child and which may be part
of a generally developing symbolic function. However, as Budwig herself has
suggested in work done since the book was published, the input may, in fact,
provide a partial explanation. Thus provided we are not worried by form
classes, children may hear my in the first position of the sentence very
frequently (my book is over there ; my sweater’s disappeared ) and may also, in
some dialects at least, have heard mine in this position and in front of a verb
(mine’s sitting over there ; mine’s lost). They will also have heard me before
some verbs (let me do it ; do you want me to get it). In the absence of control
over the syntactic case-marking on pronouns, they may generalize the
position of these forms. In addition, we know that some children hear their
caregivers using third-person reference in place of first- or second-person
quite frequently (Mummy will do it ; Does Megan want some tea ?) and first-
person plural forms in contexts which do not always straightforwardly refer
to the persons present (M to C : We’re tired and we would like to go to bed now
wouldn’t we ? – certainly not referring to herself !). One very important issue
to examine is the semantic–pragmatic contexts of these types of utterances to
see whether they can be correlated with the types of self-reference used by
the children.
Budwig makes the point that the different form–function pairings cannot
be entirely explained by a straightforward verb-island account linking a
particular form to a particular verb (Tomasello, ). Children use different
forms with the same verb (for instance Jeremy says I want and me want) but
we do need to know the extent to which the form–function pairings, both
types and tokens, might be more or less restricted to particular verbs and the
extent to which they match similar form–function pairings in the input. I do
not put these suggestions forward to challenge Budwig’s data but to
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 
contribute to an explanation of the phenomenon. It seems to me that, in
theoretical terms, the tension is between explanations that posit a learning
mechanism in the child that is designed actively to search for or create
relations between, for instance, one form and one function, and explanations
which posit a more general pattern associator which produces such relation-
ships as an interim output from patterns in the input. In either case it is
extremely interesting that an early stage in this development consists in
form–function relations which are more obviously based on semantic–
pragmatic distinctions than they appear to be in the adult grammar (though
see work suggesting that there are semantic–pragmatic distinctions between
the use of I, me and my, e.g. Taylor, ). This presents a clear
point of contact between developmental psycholinguistics and functionalist
linguistics.
This book raises other interesting issues which need more thought. One is
the predominance of self reference in subject verb structures in early
language – over  % for the youngest children and at around  % even for
the older group. This accords well with other empirical studies but since the
remainder of subject NPs in many children’s corpora often consists solely of
it and Mummy, it suggests that the range of NPs that children use as subjects
may actually be extremely limited early on. Whether this should be seen as
a reflection of what they are interested in talking about or a reflection of what
they know about the generality of the subject position in verb argument
structure is becoming a hotly debated issue.
A second interesting issue is the extent of self-reference. This is likely
to be of interest to those working on the sociocognitive aspects of early child
development and on the development of the child’s knowledge of others. It
is worth noting that despite the fact that the ‘ I ’-shifting required for first
person use is often thought of as being particularly cognitively difficult for
children, most children start to use some form to refer to themselves in
subject position almost as soon as they have any expressed subjects at all and,
as Budwig’s study clearly shows, many children use I extremely frequently
and their usage is correct.
Budwig devotes a considerable amount of space to outlining the processes
by which she arrived at her methods of data collection and coding. This is
something a book-length work allows and should be very useful both to those
who wish to compare their own data to hers and those who wish to teach the
methodology of naturalistic child language research. The main problems
with the book are first that many of the theoretical perspectives are
juxtaposed rather than fully thrashed out and secondly, from my own
research perspective, that it does not face the question of mechanism head on.
Its strengths are that it collates a great deal of work in functionalist linguistics
and the study of children’s grammatical development from a functionalist
perspective as well as presenting a detailed and original study. It attempts to
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  
do this from the perspective of a theoretically sophisticated developmental
psychology and to bring together theories in functional linguistics and
developmental psycholinguistics. That it does not fully succeed is hardly
surprising given the extraordinary difficulty of the endeavour.

REFERENCES
Bowerman, M. (). What shapes children’s grammars ? In D. Slobin (ed.), The cross-
linguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. . Hillsdale, NJ : Erlbaum.
Chiat, S. (). Context-specificity and generalization in the acquisition of pronominal
distinctions. Journal of Child Language , –.
Croft, W. (). Syntactic categories and grammatical relations : the cognitive organisation of
information. Chicago : Chicago University Press.
Goldberg, A. (). Constructions : a construction grammar approach to argument structure.
Chicago : Chicago University Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (). Language and cognitive processes from a developmental
perspective. Language and Cognitive Processes , , –.
Rispoli, M. (). Pronoun case overextensions and paradigm building. Journal of Child
Language , , –.
Slobin, D. (). Crosslinguistic evidence for the language-making capacity. In D. I. Slobin
(ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. . Hillsdale, NJ : Erlbaum.
Taylor, J. R. (). Possessive genitives in English. Linguistics , –.
Tomasello, M. (). First verbs : a case study of early grammatical development. Cambridge :
C.U.P.
(Received June ) Reviewed by E L
Department of Psychology
University of Manchester
Manchester M PL

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