Phonological acquisition, from Jakobson to frequency-based models

This paper reviews some theories that focus on the order of consonant acquisition by children, trying to capture universal tendencies and to explain cross-linguistic and individual differences. We confront the universalist propositions of Jakobson (1941) and the propositions of frequential models to longitudinal data of French-speaking children. These models making incorrect predictions, we propose a mixed model, combining universal phonological principles and feature frequencies, to account of the whole data.