A Typological Approach to Child Language Research – The Case of Whole-Word Phonology

Abstract

We present the typological approach to child language research. The typological approach places language diversity at the centre of acquisition research, thereby limiting arbitrary adjustments to theory and practice. We apply the typological approach to Ingram’s (2002) measures of whole-word phonological complexity (PMLU) and proximity (PWP). Our generalised PMLUg measure takes into account crosslinguistic variation in word status, including complex predicates and words without vowels. We analysed conversational data from Dutch, English, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Xi’iùy to determine whether two-year-old children target and produce words with significant between-language differences in phonological complexity. We found significant between-language differences in PMLUg for the target and produced words, but not PWPg. Comparing the complexity of the children’s words with the complexity of target words reveals their growth potentials along the syllable and consonant dimensions. Our study begins the cumulative investigation of the features that determine whole-word phonological complexity and proximity crosslinguistically.