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The past ten years have shown an ever-increasing revival of interest in phonological acquisition. The most fundamental change is probably that Optimality Theory (OT) has reinstated continuity developmental grammars and final adult grammars have the same representational units and organizational principles. The development from an initial grammar to a final grammar had been pictured as a continuous process. In OT the basic idea is that constraints are innate and universal and come with an initial ranking where all markedness constraints outrank all faithfulness constraints. The learner needs to acquire the language-specific ranking of these constraints. By subsequent rerankings, the initial grammar gradually develops into the target-appropriate final grammar. With this state-of-the-art paper in mind, a survey was sent out to a large group of people involved in research on phonological acquisition. They were asked, among other things, what they thought the "state of the art" of the field was, and in which directions the field should proceed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]