Kathleen Currie Hall

Notes on Vihman, M. M. (1993). Variable paths to early word production. Journal of Phonetics, 21, 61-82.

1. Two basic models of phonological development: developmental/biological and cognitive/creative.  In this paper, Vihman assumes a modified combination of the two -- biological foundations, with individual biological variation and limits on variation, influenced by the ambient language and shaped by active cognitive integration.

2. The focus of the paper is variation across phonological acquisition: there is evidence of some universal development; some language-particular development; and some idiosyncratic, child-specific development.  Child-specific variation seems to come mostly from internal sources (anatomy, physiology, attention, memory, etc.).

3. The input that a child receives, the attention that he pays to that input, and the ability of the child to match up input with particular babbling that he has made himself (the "articulatory filter") are crucial factors in shaping phonological development.

Questions:
1. Am I just being hypercritical?  It seems like a lot of the conclusions / main points / etc. are based on very limited data and were not really backed up with solid evidence or statistics.  (e.g. standard deviations in Tables I and II do not always "drop" as drastically as the text makes it seem; Vihman says says that internal sources of variation must dominate over external ones because the evidence "seems sufficient" -- based on what?  etc.)  Perhaps I am just not well-enough versed in this literature to understand what she was talking about, but I often got confused while reading this paper.

2. Can we look at more about how kids "develop a network of related forms" -- alluded to briefly on p. 78?