ABSTRACT
Natural Phonology is generally seen as outside the dominant generative paradigm. David Stampe was the prime mover behind this theory (see, Stampe, 1969, 1979), and his work came out of the study of cross-linguistic patterns in phonology, especially in the acquisition of phonology by children. He noticed that similar patterns tended to occur irrespective of the target language. This led him to believe that certain aspects, at least, of phonology could be deemed to be ‘natural’, whereas others were idiosyncratic aspects of a particular language. Naturalness, however, was not confined to merely ‘occurring often’, but had to have some kind of phonetic plausibility. This approach to phonology has proved to be very popular with speech clinicians; however, as we will discuss later, it is not always clear that those who apply Natural Phonology to clinical data are following the theory as Stampe outlined it.2
