Minimal Violation and Phonological Development

Abstract

This article examines some consequences of optimality theoretic constraint ranking and violability for the study of phonological development. It is well known that the phonetic shape of child utterances is subject to strict restrictions. When these restrictions are captured in terms of minimally violable, rather than inviolable, constraints, the effects of a constraint that is overcome in development can continue to persist through successive developmental stages and into the mature system. The empirical base for this study is provided by previously unpublished data from a longitudinal corpus of phonetically transcribed speech from four English-learning children (Compton and Streeter (1977)). Evidence for this view of development as constraint reranking is found in a comparison of the prosodic structure of child and adult English and in a developmental change in the application of consonant harmony; minimal violation in the child system itself occurs in the patterns of content preservation displayed by truncations.