Beschreibung:
<jats:p>In her paper “The acquisition process of consonantal clusters in the child: some universal rules?”, Velta Rūķe-Draviņa focuses on one of the oldest and most persistent issues in language development—the degree to which order of acquisition is governed by universals. An alternative way of formulating her question is: does one do a better job of predicting features of child language acquisition from knowing about the specific language being learned or from knowing about characteristics of all the world's languages? Suppose the language to be learned makes frequent use of a structure that is relatively rare in the world's languages, and thus presumably highly marked? Will the child learn the structure in question early because of its importance in the target language, or late because of its markedness?</jats:p>