more on babbling

[Marilyn Vihman]

In view of the various responses to Annette's question, which looked 
as if they had missed mine, I'm sending mine out again - sorry! It's 
based on recordings of nearly 200 babies exposed to UK English and 
100-150 exposed to Welsh in North Wales.

At 9:14 am +0100 12/9/06, Marilyn Vihman wrote:
>Several brief things to say in response:
>
>1. Yes, [d] is used the most in babbling, at least in 
>English-learning babies, but not by ALL babies learning English, 
>just most; this is not the case for Welsh, for example, so it's 
>safer not to generalise to all languages.
>
>2. babies' first word is not by any means always or even often 
>'daddy', although a fond parent hearing 'dadada' may choose to 
>interpret the baby that way.
>
>3. Yes, 'daddy', 'papa', and 'mama' are definitely easier because of 
>the use of only one C across the word.
>
>4. John Locke has a JCL paper on the use of 'mama' and 'papa' as 
>early words in many languages - following up on a much earlier paper 
>by Jakobson. The Locke paper was in the mid-1990s, I think.
>
>-marilyn

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