A Study on Child Phonology

This study aims to survey the child phonological systems and features. Phonological systems have been viewed as comprising rules for two types of phenomenon: segmental and suprasegmental. Segmental rules affect the presence of and precise phonetic feature values associated with individual consonant and vowel segments. Suprasegmental rules concern properties of pronunciation that typically affect constituents larger than the segment, particularly stress, intonation and tone. In this paper, firstly, I will explain that children's spontaneous babbling and early intelligible speech show a distribution of speech sounds that can be matched in many ways to the gross frequencies with which sounds occur in adult language - unmarked sounds predominate, while more marked sounds are on the whole later acquired and less frequent in children's utterances. Secondly, we can show that children appear to do rather well in their handling of stress, intonation tunes and tone.