Simplification: A Strategy in the Adult Acquisition of a Foreign Language: An Example From Indonesian/Malay¹

We think of language acquisition as a process in which the child arrives at adult grammar gradually by attempting to match to the speech it hears a succession of hypotheses of an increasing order of complexity …as these increasingly complex hypotheses become available to the child through maturational change. For phonology this was clearly shown by Jacobson's spectacular discovery that the child learns phonemes in a largely fixed order, which is determined not externally by the order or frequencies with which they are heard, but internally by their relative linguistic complexity, as reflected also in the rules governing the possible phonemic systems of the languages of the world.