The ontogeny of phonological categories and the primacy of lexical learning in linguistic development

In this paper, we draw on recent developments in several areas of cognitive science that suggest that the lexicon is at the core of grammatical generalizations at several different levels of representation. Evidence comes from many sources, including recent studies on language processing in adults and on language acquisition in children. Phonological behavior is influenced very early by pattern frequency in the lexicon of the ambient language, and we propose that phonological acquisition might provide the initial bootstrapping into grammatical generalization in general. The phonological categories over which pattern frequencies are calculated, however, are neither transparently available in the audiovisual signal nor deterministically fixed by the physiological and perceptual capacities of the species. Therefore, we need several age-appropriate models of how the lexicon can influence a child's interactions with the ambient language over the course of phonological acquisition.