This paper deals with methods and models appropriate to the systematic linguistic study of the child's acquisiton of phonology. Sections I through IV present a review of previous studies in the field, discuss the usefulness of the concept of "innateness," discriminate between phonetic and phonological ability, and discuss the concept of discrete units in language and its relationship to language learning. Section V then presents a "Preliminary Outline of Phonology Acquisition" based on the theory that the acquisiton of phonology involves a large number of interrelated stages which cannot be strictly isolated from one another. The idea of a "prelinguistic" stage is rejected, it being assumed that the child's linguistic development begins soon after birth. The child's development through the babbling stage and his acquisition of the concepts of sentence, syllable, segment and distinctive feature are then traced. Because the syllable is considered the first elementary unit of a child's speech and therefore of importance as the source of other units, the lengthy final section of the paper is devoted to the acquistion of syllable structure. (FWB)