A crosslinguistic investigation of vowel formants in babbling

Abstract

A cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in babbling was carried out. 1047 vowels produced by twenty 10-monthold infants from Parisian French, London English, Hong Kong Cantonese and Algiers Arabic language backgrounds were recorded in the cities of origin and spectrally analysed. F1-F2 plots of these vowels were obtained for each subject and each language group. Statistical analyses provide evidence of differences between infants across language backgrounds. These differences parallel those found in adult speech in the corresponding languages. Implications of an early build-up of targetlanguage-oriented production skills are discussed.

Reviews

“…Similarly, Boysson-Bardies and Vihman's 1991 study of contrasts in crosslinguistic babbling and first words (French, English, Japanese, Swedish) provides evidence of statistically significant differences among these groups. As with Boysson-Bardies et al 1989, these differences parallel those found in the adult's input. The effects of the adult's input over the child's output include both the loss of structures not found in the adult language, and the increasing production of sounds to which the adult input provides enough exposure.…”

“…The authors of this paper are well suited for this job, since they are both major players in this field (see, e.g., Boysson-Bardies et al 1984, Boysson-Bardies et al 1989, Boysson-Bardies and Vihmari 1991. For example, the Boys son- Bardies et al ( 1989) acoustic study of vowel formants in crosslinguistic babbling (English, French, Chinese, Arabic) shows that vowel production begins to approximate favored values in the adult language even before production of the first words. Their analysis of 1,047 vowels provides evidence of statistically significant differences between infants across language backgrounds.…”

Infant vocalizations in response to speech: Vocal imitation and developmental change

“…If 15 min of laboratory exposure to a specific vowel is sufficient to influence infants' production of that vowel, then listening to the ambient language for many weeks could plausibly provide sufficient exposure to induce the kind of change seen in infants between 12 and 20 weeks of age. 2 It is known from the results of babbling studies in different cultures that very long-term exposure to speech influences infant speech production (de Boysson-Bardies et al, 1989;de Boysson-Bardies et al, 1984). Two-year-olds from different cultures clearly sound different.…”

Origins of theory of mind, cognition and communication

“…Oller and others have discovered that deaf and hearingimpaired infants babble differently from infants with normal hearing (Kent, Osberger, Netsell, & Hustedde, 1987;Oller & Eilers, 1988;Oller & Lynch, 1992;Locke, 1993;StoelGammon & Otomo, 1986). Moreover, it has been reported that 1-year-olds in different cultures babble differently (de Boysson-Bardies, Halle, Sagart & Durand, 1989;de BoyssonBardies, Sagart & Durand, 1984). As in these other studies, our vocal imitation data reaffirm how important hearing is to vocal productions: in our short-term laboratory study, we discovered that exposure to sounds is sufficient to alter the nature and quality of infants' vocal productions.…”