Acquiring the phonology of lexical tone in infancy

Phonology is bimodular: prosody (relational aspects) and melody (‘phonetic’ aspects) are to some extent autonomous in steady-state (adult) language. Therefore the acquisition of individual melodic and prosodic modules and their subsequent orientation with respect to one another must constitute three different developmental tasks. The acquisition of melodic primes may take place independently of any other process. If infant perception has this kind of phonological import, then disparate phonetic reflexes which are predicted as phonologically identical might show parallels in acquisition.