“…Disyllables dominate the early lexicon of children acquiring most of the other languages in which early word phonology has been extensively investigated, through either diary or observational studies (Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Welsh). The Germanic languages generally may constitute exceptions, as monosyllables appear to be the most common early word form in Dutch (e.g., Elbers and Ton 1985) and German (Leopold 1939;Elsen 1996) as well as English; for Swedish our data show that monoand disyllabic early word forms are in close balance. Table 1 indicates proportions of word targets of di¤ering lengths in a crosslinguistic sample of early word data, with 3-25 children represented in each language group.…”