babbling

[David Snow]

Hello all,

    In response to Ann Dowker's cogent question, I think Marilyn Vihman's 
work is relevant indeed to the issues about babbling and early meaningful 
speech that are at the center of this current group discussion (the work of 
Marilyn Vihman and other child phonologists who have, in recent years, 
contributed so much to the study of babbling and early speech development).

    In his crosslinguistic review of early vocal development, John Locke 
pointed out that [d] was the most frequent consonant in late babbling. 
Linguistic evidence (including phonetic surveys of world's languages) also 
suggests that [d] is the most basic and universal of consonants. However, it 
can be argued that labials (especially stops) are the simplest of consonants 
for most children. De Boysson-Bardies, Vihman, Roug-Hellichius et al., in 
their landmark 1992 study, showed that labials are remarkably common in 
early phonology, and, most importantly, that the frequency of labials 
actually increases universally as children advance from babbling to 
meaningful speech (suggesting a nonlinear pattern of the type that has been 
increasingly observed in recent studies of  children's phonological 
development). Marilyn Vihman and colleagues have also shown that precocious 
word learners in English take advantage of "labial simplicity" as a powerful 
phonetic basis for early word production. The simplicity of labials, at 
least in part, is probably owing to the visual aspect. Children can use the 
strong visual cues of labials in the input to strengthen what Vihman has 
described as children's early "vocal motor schemes." All this, in addition, 
helps to explain why young children with hearing impairments may have 
labials in their inventory but few if any coronals (e.g., studies by 
Stoel-Gammon and colleagues), and children with severe visual impairments do 
not seem to demonstrate the advantage of labials over coronals in early word 
production that was described above for infants and toddlers with normal or 
impaired hearing but without impairments of vision.

David Snow

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ann Dowker" <ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk>
To: "Annette Karmiloff-Smith" <a.karmiloff at ich.ucl.ac.uk>
Cc: <info-childes at mail.talkbank.org>; "Fletcher , Paul" <P.Fletcher at ucc.ie>; 
"'Alison Crutchley'" <a.crutchley at hud.ac.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2006 12:09 PM
Subject: RE: babbling


> Could Marilyn Vihman's work be relevant here?
>
> Ann
>
>