Natural phonological processes at the one-word stage

The claim is made that the child's deviations from adult pronunciations reflect only processes natural to phonological systems in general. This claim is investigated with respect to the speech of a Hebrew-English bilingual at the one-word stage of her development. Concern is with word and syllable structure rather than with the articulation of specific segments. From this point of view, some 30% of the subject's lexicon consists of words which are produced 'in full'. For the rest, three types of processes are manifested: reduplication (section 2.1), which is shown to be marginal in the subject investigated, though possibly a "necessary nursery device" (Jakobson 1962: 542); transposition (section 2.2) - attributed to a perceptual blurring of boundaries; and reduction (section 2.3) - of consonant clusters, of single consonants, and of occasional syllables - accounting for well over half the subject's 'deviations', and yielding a preferred CV or CVCV syllable structure for English and Hebrew words alike. This is explained by the need to avoid #C ... C# sequences at this stage in the subject's productive speech development. Developmental changes (section 3) are shown to typically take the form of expansions, which allow for an occasional CVC or CVCVC type of one-word construction at a later point in the subject's linguistic development.