A Usage-based Approach to Clinical Phonology

In the last two decades many studies of language acquisition have been framed in what has come to be called “usage-based theory” (Dąbrowska & Lieven, 2005; Tomasello, 2005). The main premise of this approach is that experience with language in both children and adults shapes the cognitive representations and processes that make production and perception possible. Rather than proposing innate structures or processes, this theory proposes that with an array of mostly domain-general abilities operating on linguistic input, phonological and morphological units as well as constructions can emerge from the categorization of that input (Beckner et al., 2009; Bybee, 2001, 2006, 2010; Larsen-Freeman, 1997).