Comparing lexical and phonological development: a longitudinal study of two child learners of English

Abstract

In this thesis, I compare the lexical and phonological development of two child learners of English (Georgia and Charlotte) from the English-Davis corpus, available through the Phonbank database (http://phonbank.talkbank.org/). I analyze the structure and content of the children's expressive vocabularies at each relevant phonological milestone, which I compare to their development of consonants in syllable onsets. Very few correlations are found between the structure of the children's lexicons and their individual patterns of phonological development. These observations pose a challenge to the Lexical Restructuring Model (Metsala 1997), which posits the lexicon as the primary force driving children's phonological development. Instead, the data reveal that patterns of phonological development are best understood in terms of the perceptual-articulatory phonological categories they involve, independent of the learners' lexicons. These findings are discussed in light of the PRIMIR and A-map models of language development (Werker & Curtin 2005; McAllister Byun, Inkelas & Rose 2016).