Marilyn May Vihman (2019). Phonological templates in development. (Oxford Studies in Phonology and Phonetics.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xvi + 356.

Abstract

In her 2019 book, Phonological templates in development, Marilyn May Vihman lays out a career’s worth of work on the role of templates in children’s phonological and lexical development. The book provides rich historical context and compiles a huge wealth of data in one place. It will be of interest to any student of phonological development, especially those who are interested in a concrete framework for defining and measuring a child’s phonological patterns from a larger lexical perspective. At the same time, with its references to exemplar theory (e.g. Jusczyk 1992) and Dynamic Systems Theory (Thelen & Smith 1994), the book is also relevant for those more broadly interested in cognitive development. Data from children learning a variety of languages, along with detailed appendices of children’s productions and adult templatic forms, will be tantalising for linguists who may want to do further analyses. Vihman’s main proposal is that, after an early stage of relatively accurate productions, children expand their vocabulary and phonetic repertoire by taking a templatic approach, selecting words that fit those templates and adapting those that do not. These templates reflect universal truths about motor and cognitive development, but do not otherwise rely on any sort of linguistic universal; in fact, the templates are in large part idiosyncratic from one child to the next. Vihman outlines how templates are defined, calculated and measured, illustrating these steps with data from a variety of languages along the way. She situates her theory within the broader Dynamic Systems Theory, focusing on the role of the child’s own actions and perceptions in shaping their phonologies, and on the complex interplay between ever-changing forces such as motor skills, vocabulary size and external language input. She rejects the notion that there must be continuity between the child grammar and the adult grammar, instead noting that both continuities and discontinuities are expected. The book’s chapters can be generally divided into three sections: background information (Chapters 1 and 2), detailed characterisations of templatic analyses (Chapters 3–5) and implications of the theory, especially as it relates to fully developed phonologies (Chapters 6–9).