Barbara H. Bernhardt and Joseph P. Stemberger (1998). Handbook of phonological development from the perspective of constraint-based nonlinear phonology. San Diego: Academic Press. Pp. xiii+793.

Abstract

The goals that Bernhardt & Stemberger set for themselves in this bookI would like to thank Todd Bailey, Barbara Bernhardt, Dan Dinnsen, Heather Goad, Sharon Hargus, Linda Lombardi, John McCarthy, Geoffrey Nathan, Elena Nicoladis, Alan Prince, Paul Smolensky, Joseph Stemberger and Wolf Wikeley for their comments on a draft of this review, and the Rutgers Optimality Archive (http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/roa.html) for facilitating its distribution. This work was supported by SSHRC research grant 410-98-1595, for which I am grateful. are extremely ambitious. Assuming only a very basic knowledge of phonological theory on the part of the reader, they aim to provide an introduction to non-linear phonology and to its constraint-based implementation in Optimality Theory, and to show how this framework can describe and illuminate a wide range of data on phonological development, as well as how the child data can inform theory construction. In doing this, they also present what they claim is a comprehensive inventory of the attested phenomena of child phonology, as well as a new proposal about the nature and range of possible constraints in Optimality Theory. The scope of the book is widened even further by the authors' use of data from children with both normal and delayed phonological development, and by their use of theoretical constructs drawn from literature on processing and connectionism. These ambitious and wide-ranging goals match the relatively large and diverse audience that Bernhardt & Stemberger hope to reach with this book: theoretical phonologists, researchers examining phonological development from various linguistic and psychological perspectives, and speech-language pathologists.

For its depth and breadth of theoretical and empirical coverage, this book will be of considerable value to anyone involved in phonological theory that has an interest in child phonology (although depending on one's circumstances, this value may or may not match the publisher's asking price of $149·95). As a phonologist working in Optimality Theory and acquisition, I was impressed with the extent to which the ideas, data and references to earlier work were new to me. I now turn to this book regularly to help answer questions about phonological development, both those that come up in my own research and those raised by colleagues and students.