This book compiles original studies investigating crosslinguistic child phonological development in typical and atypical settings, that is, protolanguage phonology. The chapters address topics and issues not widely or exhaustively reported in the literature, such as research on under-represented languages and foci of interest, as well as information that has remained little-known to the field. It documents recent developments on typically developing populations, and atypical developmental speech in children with autism, developmental language disorder affecting speech, childhood apraxia of speech, phonological assessment and intervention, phonological awareness in (a)typical contexts affecting literacy, and motor speech analysis in speech sound disorders. The book will be of interest to linguists and academic researchers, as well as postgraduate students who are investigating child language acquisition in monolingual settings.

Elena Babatsouli is the Ben Blanco Memorial/BORSF Endowed Professor in Communicative Disorders and an Associate Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech (Equinox), Associate Editor of the Journal of Child Language (Cambridge Core), in the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Child Language, and a referee of the European Research Council Executive Agency Consolidator Grant. Dr. Babatsouli also serves on the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s Multicultural Issues Board. Her research and scholarship focus on cross-linguistic monolingual and multilingual acquisition/use by children and adults in typical and disordered speech contexts, having published in journals, edited volumes, and encyclopedias. Among several edited/co-edited books (like An Anthology of Bilingual Child Phonology (2020) Multilingual Matters) journal special issues, and conference proceedings, she has recently published Multilingual Acquisition and Learning: An Ecosystemic View to Diversity (2024) for John Benjamins.