Prelinguistic Development: Production

Question 1

Prelinguistic Stages

Answer 1

1. Speech Perception: What does the infant discriminate?

2. Speech Production: What does the infant articulate?

Question 2

Speech Production Hypotheses

Answer 2

1. Infants babble all sounds (Jakobson)
2. Infants follow invariant stages (Locke)
3. Infants follow stages with environmental effects between 0;8 - 1;0 (de Boyssons-Bardies)

Question 3

Methods

Answer 3

Study anatomical changes of speech tract
Transcribe speech sounds (adapt for properties above)
Perceptual tasks

Question 4

Child vs. Adult (3 differences)

Answer 4

1. tongue size (large) & movements (front/back)
2. Pharynx
3. Respiration

Question 5

Transcription

Answer 5

Auditory judgement- spectral feature: listen & use spectrograms (Stark)
Functional Categorization (e.g. yell, raspberry, etc.) (Oller)

Question 6

Oller’s Stages (5)

Answer 6

1. Reflexive crying & vegetatie sounds (0;0-0;2)
2. Cooing & laughter (0;2-0;4)
3. Vocal Play (0;4-0;6)–> Raspberry, squeal, yell, growl. (practice speech parametric- pitch, loudness, timing, resonance.)
4. Cononical Babbling (0;6 & onward)
   
   • —> Reduplicated: repeated consonant, variegated : different Cs and Vs
5. Jargon (0;10 & onward)–> sentence like productions, but meaningless.

Question 7

Metaphonological Parameters

Answer 7

Resonance- vowels vs. consonants
Timing- breathing for CV sequences
Amplitude- Stress vs. unstressed
Pitch- stress and intonation

Question 8

Consonants most likely to hear in Babbling/ Child’s 1st words

Answer 8

m,b,p,w,d,t,s,j,g,k,h

Question 9

Perceptual Task

Answer 9

1. Play selection of infant vocalization
2. Ask listener to identify language (french, arabic, chinese)
3. Results: infants can be identified by language by 1;0

Question 10

Transcription Study (De Boysson-Bardies & Vihman)

Answer 10

1. Babbling in French, English, Japanese, & Swedish.
2. 5 children per language
3. 0;9 to first 25 words
4. Results:
   
   • French use more labials and dentals
   • English use more labials and dentals
   • Japanese use Dentals and velars
   • Swedish use dentals and velars
5. Support Hypothesis 3: Infants follow stages with environmental effects between 0;8 - 1;0

Question 11

Interpretation

Answer 11

1. Early speech influenced by anatomical change (0;0-0;6 or so)
2. vocal play and babbling show practice of main speech parameters (0;6 & onward)
3. Speech begins to take on properties of the native language (around 1 yr)

Question 12

Summary of prelinguistic development production

Answer 12

1. Children have undergone vocal tract maturation and articulatory practice at the time of 1st words
2. Later babbling shows sounds of the ambient language.

Question 13

Is there a stage of canonical babbling following by variegated babbling? (Mitchelle & Kent)

Answer 13

Wanted to test Oller’s claim that canonical babbling precedes variegated babbling.
Results: Felt the two stages occur at the same time/rate over the babbling period. Occur together at canonical babbling.