Implicational Language Laws

Language universals (also called language laws or co-occurrences) constitute universal, implicational relationships that occur across all languages. Moreover, they allow clinicians to identify ideal intervention sounds because they allow SLPs to predict what changes would occur in a system if particular sounds were targeted. Language universals have been identified to explain the relationships between sound classes (phonemic laws), word positions (distributional laws) and clusters (syllable structure laws). In each law, there is a marked structure (more complex) that implies the presence or co-occurrence of the unmarked structure (less complex). The language laws are summarized in this document. For a more complete description, the reader is directed to Gierut’s 2007 article entitled Phonological Complexity and Language Learnability available here.