Stepping backwards in development: integrating developmental speech perception with lexical and phonological development--a commentary on Stoel-Gammon's 'Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children'.

Within the subfields of linguistics, traditional approaches tend to examine different phenomena in isolation. As Stoel-Gammon (this issue) correctly states, there is little interaction between the subfields. However, for a more comprehensive understanding of language acquisition in general and, more specifically, lexical and phonological development, wemust consider relations between multiple subfields. That is, by examining the interactions between these subfields, a greater understanding of lexical and phonological development can emerge. For instance, the interaction between phonology, syntax and semantics is demonstrated in recent work looking at how phonological patterns can provide a basis for inferring a word’s lexical category (such as nouns and verbs) (Christiansen, Onnis & Hockema, 2009; Lany & Saffran, 2010). Stoel-Gammon provides an extensive overview of data from developmental speech production to establish the relationship between lexical and phonological development. Numerous studies demonstrate that phonological patterning is one factor that determines which words are produced and learned by children. A range of findings provide evidence for this factor, such as studies examining the connection between children’s prelinguistic and later word productions (Vihman, 1992) and studies comparing phonological distributions in children’s early lexicons to children’s production accuracy (Stoel-Gammon, 1998). A wealth of knowledge can be gathered from the studies that Stoel-Gammon reviews. Speech production studies in particular, have provided linguists with a solid foundation of how the phonological system develops in conjunction with the acquisition of words. However, to fully understand lexical and phonological acquisition, it is essential that we also take a step back in development. We also need to consider findings in related fields such as infant speech perception and look