The development of phonology in Spanish and Portuguese

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The Development of Phonology in Spanish and Portuguese applies Mayerthaler and Bailey's seminal work in linguistic naturalness and markedness to child language development. The book focuses on Spanish and Portuguese in their many varieties, including their 'daughter' creole and fusion and koine languages, as it systematically examines the acquisition of a range of phonological constructions. The account is further enhanced by reference to historical language change, contact language phenomena and creolization. This highly integrated study demonstrates the impetus and predictive force of markedness theory. It is shown that first-language phonological acquisition, creole phonology, and historical phonology share a large number of universal features. Biological constraits such as language universals and markedness considerations interact in a significant manner in child language, creolization, and historical change with superstrate/substrate languages, and all are affected by the age of the speaker and sociocommunicational constraints such as literacy, borrowing, decreolization, and hypercorrection.