Preliminaries

TL;DRAbstract

I assume that humans have as one module of the mind/brain a faculty of language in the sense of Chomsky (e.g. 2000). The domain of this module is knowledge of language: more specifically of ‘I-language’ – the individual's internalised knowledge of his or her mother tongue. As an idealisation characteristic of all scientific endeavour, this module, which is a psychological construct, can be treated independently of other cognitive systems and can itself be broken down into a number of sub-systems. That is, the language faculty has internal structure such that it makes sense, for the sake of theoretical investigation, to isolate language from memory, morality and music, and phonology from syntax, morphology and semantics (see Chomsky, passim; Hauser et al., 2002; Smith, N. V., 2004; Carruthers, 2006, 2008). On these assumptions phonology constitutes a natural sub-part of the study of I-language, and one area of phonological investigation is devoted to studying the acquisition of phonolog

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