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Consonant Clusters—Some Thoughts: Comment on Velta Rūķe-Draviņa's paper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Catherine E. Snow
Catherine E. Snow
Affiliation:
Harvard Graduate School of Education
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Extract

In her paper “The acquisition process of consonantal clusters in the child: some universal rules?”, Velta Rūķe-Draviņa focuses on one of the oldest and most persistent issues in language development—the degree to which order of acquisition is governed by universals. An alternative way of formulating her question is: does one do a better job of predicting features of child language acquisition from knowing about the specific language being learned or from knowing about characteristics of all the world's languages? Suppose the language to be learned makes frequent use of a structure that is relatively rare in the world's languages, and thus presumably highly marked? Will the child learn the structure in question early because of its importance in the target language, or late because of its markedness?

Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , December 1990 , pp. 165 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

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