EARLY PHONOLOGICAL AND LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT AND OTITIS-MEDIA - A DIARYSTUDY

This diary study describes early phonological and lexical development in a child with chronic otitis media with effusion. Equipped with the tools of a referential/analytic language-learner, the child solved the problem of reduced and fluctuating auditory input with phonological s election and avoidance strategies that capitalized on prosodic cues. T his 'tone-language' approach resulted in a lexical inventory that woul d be categorized as an extreme expressive style. Having 'boot-strapped ' her lexical learning, the child continued to rely on phonological co nstraints and selection strategies to fuel lexical and syntactic growt h, i.e. cross-domain interactions leading to a vocabulary spurt and th e onset of two-word utterances. These findings illustrate the need to consider interactions among performance, input and linguistic constrai nts in order to explain individual variation in language learning.