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Evidence from young children's early phonological development is brought to bear on the evaluation of a newly proposed type of correspondence relation within optimality theory (McCarthy and Prince (1995), Prince and Smolensky (1993)) namely sympathy. Sympathy has been advanced to account for certain opacity effects in fully developed languages. Given the claims of the theory, comparable opacity effects are expected to occur in the course of acquisition. Toward this end, different interactions of two common phenomena-that is, final consonant omission and vowel lengthening before voiced consonants-are examined with a focus on a case study of 2 young children with phonological delays in their acquisition of English. We argue that at least some developmental opacity effects support sympathy and that such effects naturally emerge in the course of development from the harmonic ranking of sympathy over input-output faithfulness and the incremental demotion of markedness constraints.

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This volume is an excellent introduction to the principles and workings of optimality theory, a relatively new constraint-based framework. The focus is on phonology, which is where the theory thus far has had its greatest impact. A basic understanding of phonology and earlier rule-based derivational theories is assumed. At appropriate points, Kager distinguishes the different claims made by optimality theory and derivational theories. The exercises and suggested readings at the end of each chapter make the book highly suitable as a textbook. The conclusion of each chapter also provides a good summary of the main points. In addition to conventional subject and language indexes, a helpful index of constraints is included with page numbers for where the constraint is defined and used.