babbling

[Annette Karmiloff-Smith]

that is so helpful.  thank you.
Annette

At 14:01 -0400 12/9/06, David Snow wrote:
>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