David Ingram (4) (1944–)

Good, compendious introduction to a fascinating topic. 1989 is a long time ago in a burgeoning field like language acquisition, and some of the research presented here is a bit obstinately theory-driven in a way that strikes me as problematic as well as superseded--like, this thing with drawing conclusions about acquisition of /t/ and /d/ when you haven't done any work yet on acquisition of flapping--it basically implies that the sound in the middle of words like "butter" is a /t/ for kids show more even before they've learned to read, which is incredibly dubious at best. To his credit, Ingram acknowledges issues like this and walks us through what we can take away from the work anyway (not like he's got anything to lose, in that particular case, since it's not his research). He puts the boots into Stampe's Natural Phonology, which you can think of as generative acquisition-of-phonology (once again, more important to have done in 1989 than now); he presents findings establishing the chronological priority of perception acquisition over production acquisition, the contingency of phoneme acquisition both on language, salience, and ease of articulation, and the strong variability of it all. Good starting point. show less