The acquisition of consonant clusters in polish: A case study

Introduction: The basis for children’s phonological processes has been the subject of a long-standing debate in the literature. Should these processes be taken to reflect the tuning of an abstract rule or constraint-based system, or the development of motor and cognitive skills? The former approach is rooted in the generative tradition (Chomsky and Halle 1968), which postulates a rule-based (Smith 1973; Stampe 1979) or, more recently, a constraint-based (Gnanadesikan 2004; Fikkert and Levelt 2008) system as the starting point of phonological acquisition. It assumes that development proceeds through the reorganization of rules or the reranking of constraints. Under this approach, the basic units of phonological organization are segments. In contrast, the cognitive approach has assigned much more importance to the word as a whole. Ferguson and Farwell (1975) were the first to explicitly argue that the word is the first basic unit of phonological organization. Word-based processes, demonstrated for several other children (cf. Waterson 1971; Priestly 1977), led to the proposal of “word templates” (Vihman and Velleman 2000), which would serve as constraints that control the overall shape of the word rather than affecting particular segments.