deaf children's babbling

Thu Feb 7 03:38:16 UTC 2008

Dear Ravi,
I suggest you read the first two chapters of D. K. Oller, The Emergence of the Speech Capacity (Erlbaum, 2000).  Chapter 2 includes "Myths about Babbling and the Tradition of Transcription".  One myth that he discusses is the one you report about deaf children's normal babbling. I think you'll see that with a more careful description of "normal babbling," the term does not characterize the early vocalizations of deaf children.  
(Do you have access to that book?)

Barbara Pearson

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Sunil kumar Ravi 
  To: info-childes at googlegroups.com 
  Cc: Carol Slater ; Barbara Pearson 
  Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2008 10:18 PM
  Subject: Re: bilingual babbling?

  Respected,

  Iam a student of Master of Science (Speech - Language Pathology) at All India Institute of Speech and Hearing. INDIA. 

  regarding that question of how is babbling in bilingual child, actually speaking, babbling does not depend on any of the language. let it be L1 or L2. I will give one example of hearing impaired children. children with congenital hearinmg impairement also produces babbling. that is, their language development will be normal till this babbling stage in the development of language. here, without hearing any language only, children are able to produce babbling. so.. babbling does not depend on any language which we use. 

  There are some studies regarding babbling in Hearing impaired children and most of the studies says this only. 

  This answer is based on my experience with children with hearing impaired in our clinic. and this is purely my opinion, anyone can give their suggestions. 

  Regards.

  Sunil Kumar. Ravi

  On Feb 7, 2008 1:33 AM, Barbara Pearson <bpearson at research.umass.edu> wrote:

    Dear Carol, 

    There is interesting material on bilingual babies' perception of their two languages, which you will find reviewed in articles by Janet Werker (in McCardle & Hoff, 2006, and Applied Psycholinguistics 2007, volume 28 (3)). (I report on it a little in an article in the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Child Language, edited by Edith Bavin.)  The psycholinguistic methodologies show pretty clearly that bilingual babies can distinguish the phonetic/ phonemic characteristics of their two languages "prelinguistically."  Whether they can reproduce the differences reliably--again prelinguistically--is still open to debate.  But your student should know that there is debate.  Our student Ana Navarro summarized various positions in the introduction to her dissertation, part of which is in the ISB4 volume.

    Navarro, A., Pearson, B. Z., Cobo-Lewis, A.B., & Oller, D. K. (2005).   Differentiation in early phonological adaptation?   In J. Cohen, K. McAlister, K. Rolstad, & J. MacSwan (Eds.) ISB4: Proceedings of the 4 th International Symposium on Bilingualism (pp.1690-1702).   Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

    Your student's question about mixing the elements of both languages depends on the prior question of when babies can be said to have elements of both languages to mix.  There are claims to the contrary--and we think we see some movement away from universal tendencies in production by 11 months--but we think the common claim to hear babies babbling in different languages (bilinguals, or monolinguals in different languages) depends on a combination of expectation on the part of the hearer and the production of early words interspersed in the babbling, which persists for quite some time.  

    Ana's experiment used early words produced by children 26 months old, and with children that old, listeners were barely able to distinguish the language the child was using when they didn't have the lexical information to guide them.  That is not prelinguistic and it doesn't mean that there might not be some nascent tendencies toward differentiation in the acoustics of the speech signal, but the ears *of people who don't know which language they are hearing* don't reliably pick the differences out. (Until computers, it was hard to remove language context in the tapes people used for the studies.) In words (again not babbling), we and others have noted some intrusion of one language in the other, but apparently much less than in the popular idea illustrated in your example.  There are also dominance patterns, as you mention, so some children, even simultaneous bilinguals, do show the patterns of only one language.  Ana worked with Spanish and English, which may be more similar than French and Chinese, but they are nonetheless rhythmically very different.  

    Some of the people studying the acquisition of Chinese tones can also weigh in here about how soon after the onset of canonical babbling Chinese children use different tonal patterns.  But there's my two-cents.  

    Till soon,

    Barbara

    On Feb 6, 2008, at 11:21 AM, Carol Slater wrote:

      Dear All--
      After a discussion of the influence of local language on babbling, a student asked whether anything was known about babbling in babies who heard two languages regularly. Would they show both influences, e.g., produce French sounds with Chinese tonal differences? Settle for one of the languages? Does anybody have a clue? Many thanks for any information (or reassurance that we don't really know much about it). 
      Carol Slater
      Alma College
      Alma MI 48801 

    ********************************************************
    Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D.
    Depts. of Linguistics and Communication Disorders
    Research Associate, Coordinator
    South College 226
    University of Massachusetts
    Amherst MA 01003

    413.545.5023
    fax: 545.2792

    bpearson at research.umass.edu
    http://www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm/

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