Phonological development in Romanian monolingual children

Abstract

The paper aims at bringing to the fore the errors that occur in the production of children’s early words in an attempt to see what phonological processes young learners of Romanian resort to in order to simplify adult targets. The data employed come from four longitudinal corpora and from diaries kept by colleagues of mine and they have been analysed in the framework of “developmental universals” and “particulars” (Slobin 1985). The findings reveal that, to a large extent, Romanian-speaking children adopt similar strategies in dealing with challenging targets as their English peers, but also strategies determined by language-specific features.

Keywords

• acquisition of phonology
• phonological processes
• adult targets
• developmental path