The goals that Bernhardt & Stemberger set for themselves in this
bookI would like to thank Todd Bailey, Barbara Bernhardt, Dan
Dinnsen, Heather Goad, Sharon Hargus, Linda Lombardi, John McCarthy, Geoffrey Nathan, Elena
Nicoladis, Alan Prince, Paul Smolensky, Joseph Stemberger and Wolf Wikeley for
their comments on a draft of this review, and the Rutgers Optimality Archive
(http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/roa.html) for facilitating its distribution. This work was
supported by SSHRC research grant 410-98-1595, for which I am grateful. are
extremely ambitious. Assuming only a very basic knowledge of phonological
theory on the part of the reader, they aim to provide an introduction to
non-linear phonology and to its constraint-based implementation in Optimality
Theory, and to show how this framework can describe and illuminate a wide
range of data on phonological development, as well as how the child data can
inform theory construction. In doing this, they also present what they claim is
a comprehensive inventory of the attested phenomena of child phonology, as
well as a new proposal about the nature and range of possible constraints in
Optimality Theory. The scope of the book is widened even further by the
authors' use of data from children with both normal and delayed phonological
development, and by their use of theoretical constructs drawn from literature on
processing and connectionism. These ambitious and wide-ranging goals match
the relatively large and diverse audience that Bernhardt & Stemberger hope to
reach with this book: theoretical phonologists, researchers examining phonological
development from various linguistic and psychological perspectives, and
speech-language pathologists.
For its depth and breadth of theoretical and empirical coverage, this book will
be of considerable value to anyone involved in phonological theory that has an
interest in child phonology (although depending on one's circumstances, this
value may or may not match the publisher's asking price of $149·95). As a
phonologist working in Optimality Theory and acquisition, I was impressed
with the extent to which the ideas, data and references to earlier work were new
to me. I now turn to this book regularly to help answer questions about
phonological development, both those that come up in my own research and
those raised by colleagues and students.