Selected aspects of early phonological development are described, and eight important characteristics are suggested. It is held that the child plays a highly active, creative role in the acquisition process. The child's early vocables constitute a connecting link between babbling and adult-modeled speech; the child's phonological systems for perception and production are relatively independent. In the child's construction of a phonological system for production, he begins with structural constraints in selecting adult model words and in producing his own words. The baby talk lexicon of the child's speech community provides a reservoir of phonologically simplified models on which the child can draw for his early words. The child invents and applies to his repertoire of phonetic word shapes a succession of phonological rules which regularize the pronunciation of phonetically similar words. The child gradually relaxes his constraints of selection and production to allow greater standard complexity and phonetic diversity within words. Each child follows his own distinctive route in phonological development. (Author/SW)