babbling

[Barbara Zurer Pearson]

Dear Annabelle (and Infochildes),

I guess we will need to know what level of detail you want
for your question about babbling and what ages of children
you are asking about.

I think you will receive different answers from people on
this.  That is, it's not yet resolved.  I think you will
see this topic called "ambient language effects" which
is the more general term for what Jakobson called "babbling
drift," that is, the idea that children's babbling gradually
takes on the characteristics of the language the child is
hearing (and will speak).

If one sees such effects, are they part of the sound system
per se (if it can be said to exist independently), or
are they driven by the child's developing lexicon?  It
might be that their "babbling" (is that non-lexical
vocalization?) is universal, but their emerging words
will differ according to the language(s) they are attempting.
A second question is then how early do their first words
reflect the phonetic characteristics of the languages, or
do the children make those first words with a universal
set of syllables.  This discussion is most often framed
as part of the "bilingual differentiation" question.

Marilyn Vihman's book on early phonological development (1997?)
has a comprehensive discussion of different work relating to
these topics, including her own work and references to others.
We had a Ph.D. student, Ana Navarro, at the University of Miami
who worked on these questions, but she is no longer there.
She has a short version of her work  described in the BU
Proceedings for 1998 (the 22nd annual). And this question
should be in the Infochildes archives, as it
comes up from time to time.  (I remember it specifically from
the summer of 1996, right after the IASCL in Turkey, because we
also have a related piece in the proceedings of that conference.)
If you are just starting in the question, those should get
you started.  Let me know if you have access to them (or
need me to get more precise references when I get into the
office.  You can also get Ana's references from my website,
http://www.umass.edu/aae/bp_refs.htm.  The Website for CHILDES
has directions for accessing the archives.
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/)

We worked with bilingual children from their earliest
vocalizations through about 3 years of age. Kim Oller,
who was the Principal Investigator on the project
Ana and I were working on, has audiotapes from children
of different language groups from 3 or 4 months on, and
we have analyzed some of them for these questions.

I vote for universal babbling (and relatively later language
specific phonetics), but of course there may be ambient language
effects in the babbling period in some children because
some of them begin making words from about 10 months on,
and who knows when they begin "aiming" (phonetically) at
words before they can get anyone to understand them.
As I've tried to indicate, though, the question is not
that simple.

Now that you've asked the question, you remind me that
we need to get Ana's analyses published more widely.
Please keep me posted on the direction that your
question takes you.

Good luck,

Barbara Pearson


At 11:15 AM 11/22/99 +0100, you wrote:
>hello
>
>I am a student in Speech and I would like to know if anybody could help me
>finding some experiments that have been done about babbling. Does babbling
>differ according to the language children will speak?
>Thank you
>Annabelle David
>
>______________________________________________________
>Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
>
>
******************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Project Manager, NIH Working Group on AAE

Department of Communication Disorders
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
117 Arnold House
Amherst MA 01003
413-545-5023
fax 545-0803

bpearson at comdis.umass.edu
http://www.umass.edu/aae/