Taking as a point of departure Locke's biological model for the origins of phonological development, this study encompasses analyses of phonetic tendencies, consonant use in babbling and early words, and phonological word-selection patterns. Data from 10 children aged 9 to 16 months are drawn from four lexically defined points covering the period from no word use to a cumulative vocabulary of 50 words. Individual differences are found to prevail from the start in all three domains analyzed, with some increase in uniformity across subjects with increasing knowledge of language. Furthermore, the phonological processes typical of development from age 1 to 3 or 4 years are found to be rooted in the phonetic tendencies of the prelinguistic period.

It is hypothesized that strategies and techniques employed by “expert” language learners differ from those of “novice” learners. In this study, the performance of multilingual subjects was contrasted to that of bilingual and monolingual subjects on two tasks that involved learning a miniature linguistic system. Under “implicit” learning conditions, multilingual subjects showed superior performance to that of the other two groups, but under “explicit” conditions, there were no differences. The results were interpreted in information processing terms as indicating that multilingual subjects have strategies that help them allocate processing resources more efficiently than our other subjects in formulating informal rules of limited scope under implicit conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to report a clinically induced phonemic split (i.e., the restructuring of allophones as distinct phonemes) by presenting longitudinal data from a functionally misarticulating child. For this child, three qualitatively and quantitatively distinct stages were observed relative to the acquisition of the phonemic split: 1. complementary distribution (allophones of the same phoneme); 2. position-specific free variation (intermediate to a phonemic split); and 3. phonemic distinction for some, but not all morphemes (phonemic split).

The results of this clinical case study, documenting the nature and development of a phonemic split, have implications for related phenomena in normal language acquisition, second-language learning, and sound change in primary languages.

The well-constructed study by Seidenberg, Bruck, Fornarolo, and Backman (Applied Psycholinguistics, 6(2)) is an example of the difficulties that occur when good hypotheses and elegant designs are at variance with the realities of developmental reading disorders. My goal in this essay is to use the Seidenberg et al. study as a kind of informal assessment – both of progress in our approaches to dyslexia and of the significant issues that remain, particularly the impact of varied assumptions about homogeneity in severely impaired readers.

Reading educators and clinicians dating from Orton (1928) have asserted that dyslexic children exhibit impairments in one or more aspects of the reading process that are not seen in nondyslexic children. There has been chronic disagreement about the identity and causes of these impairments, but their existence has been generally assumed. We will term this the standard view of dyslexia.

Due to a production error, the italicized line in the paragraph below was omitted from the article by Rebecca Treiman, “Spelling of stop consonants after /s/ by children and adults,” Applied Psycholinguisties 1985 (vol. 6, no. 3), page 280: Second, children's spellings change as they become familiar with the writing system. The change seen here – from a relatively high proportion of voiced spellings of stops after /s/ to only voiceless spellings – is a change from one plausible spelling to another. It is not a change from haphazard or phonetically unmotivated spellings to correct ones. Changes of the kind found here for stops after /s/ have been found elsewhere, as in the case of /t/ before /r/ (see also Ehri, 1984; Read, 1975; Treiman, 1985b). The present results support the view that certain of children's spellings errors are systematic and well motivated from a linguistic point of view.