Phonetics and Phonology 3.1. Introduction

The most obvious point to be made from this table is that the children’s early phonological errors overwhelmingly involve segments; at all ages, the percentage of errors involving individual segments is around 80%, whereas for adults the figure is 62%. This shows that at the time children begin making phonological errors, their lexical representations for words are not motoric wholes, but are clearly differentiated in terms of segments, and syllables are no longer the predominant phonological unit. How can this be explained?