Discernible differences in the babbling of infants according to target language

Boysson-Bardies, Bénédicte de; Sagart, Laurent; Durand, Christophe

doi:10.1017/s0305000900005559

Cited by 170 publications

(80 citation statements)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Babble is a means for infants to practice increasingly complex articulatory movements (e.g., varying tongue position during mandibular movement), and, as they work on this skill, to amass information about the auditory and proprioceptive consequences of their own articulatory movements and relate them to the phonetic properties of the ambient language. The effects of this process are evident in the phenomenon of "babbling drift," in which the vocalizations of infants toward the end of the first year increasingly reflect the sound inventory specific to the target language (e.g., de Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, & Durand, 1984;de Boysson-Bardies & Vihman, 1991).…”

Section: Is Babbling a Motor Skill A Language Skill Or Both?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The relationship between reduplicated babble onset and laterality biases in infant rhythmic arm movements

et al. 2007

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study examined changes in rhythmic arm shaking and laterality biases in infants observed longitudinally at three points: just prior to, at, and just following reduplicated babble onset. Infants (ranging in age from 4 to 9 months at babble onset) were videotaped at home as they played with two visually identical audible and silent rattles presented at midline for 1.5 min each. Rate of rattle shaking increased sharply from the pre-babble to babble onset session; but there was no indication that this increase was specific to the right arm. This finding suggests that the link between babble onset and increased rhythmic arm activity may not be the product of language-specific mechanisms, but is rather part of a broader developmental process that is also perceptual and motor.

show abstract

Section: Is Babbling a Motor Skill A Language Skill Or Both?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The relationship between reduplicated babble onset and laterality biases in infant rhythmic arm movements

et al. 2007

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…instead, it appears to be constrained by factors such as neuromotor development and the influence of characteristics of the child's native language (e.g., de Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, and Durand, 1984;de Boysson-Bardies, Halle, Sagart, and Durand, 1989). These constraints presumably make the process of speech sound production learning easier by providing the infant with "training sequences" that are relatively closely related to the movements required in the adult language.…”

Section: The Babbling Phasementioning

confidence: 99%

Speech sound acquisition, coarticulation, and rate effects in a neural network model of speech production.

Guenther

1995

Psychological Review

373

351

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article describes a neural network model of speech motor skill acquisition and speech production that explains a wide range of data on variability, motor equivalence, coarticulation, and rate effects. Model parameters are learned during a babbling phase. To explain how infants learn language-specific variability limits, speech sound targets take the form of convex regions, rather than points, in orosensory coordinates. Reducing target size for better accuracy during slower speech leads to differential effects for vowels and consonants, as seen in experiments previously used as evidence for separate control processes for the 2 sound types. Anticipatory coarticulation arises when targets are reduced in size on the basis of context; this generalizes the well-known look-ahead model of coarticulation. Computer simulations verify the model's properties.The primary goal of the modeling work described in this article is to provide a coherent theoretical framework that provides explanations for a wide range of data concerning the articulator movements used by humans to produce speech sounds. This is carried out by formulating a model that transforms strings of phonemes into continuous articulator movements for producing these phonemes. This study of speech production is largely motivated by the following question of speech acquisition: How does an infant acquire the motor skills needed to produce the speech sounds of his or her native language? Speech production involves complex interactions among several different reference frames. A phonetic frame describes the sounds a speaker wishes to produce, and the signals that convey these sound units to a listener exist within an acoustic frame. Tactile and proprioceptive signals form an orosensory frame (e.g., Perkell, 1980) that describes the shape of the vocal tract, and the muscles controlling the positions of individual articulators make up an articulatory frame. The parameters governing the interactions among these frames cannot be fixed at birth. One reason for this is the language specificity of these interactions. For example, English listeners distinguish between the sounds /r/ and /!/, but Japanese listeners do not. Corresponding differences are seen in the articulator movements of the two groups (Miyawaki et al., 1975). Thus, despite some obvious commonalities between the phonetics of different languages (e.g., widespread use of consonants like /d/, /n/, and /s/ across the world's languages), the precise nature of mappings between acoustic goals and articulator movements depends on the lanThis research was supported in part by Air Force Office of Scientific Research F49620-92-J-0499. I would like to thank Dan Bullock and Elliot Saltzman for their insightful suggestions on an earlier

show abstract

“…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.…”

Section: B Developmental Changes In Vowel Production: Extending the mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cross-cultural studies in which the sounds produced by young infants were phonetically transcribed suggest that infants' earliest vocalizations do not show an effect of language environment (Holmgren et al, 1986;Koopmans-van Beinum andvan der Stelt, 1986: Oller. 1978;Roug et al, 1989;Stark, 1980: Stoel-Gammon andCooper, in their vocalizations (de Boysson-Bardies et al, 1989;de Boysson-Bardies et al, 1984;de Boysson-Bardies et al, 1992). Between 2 and 3 years of age infants from different cultures show clear differences, even in subtle measures (Stoel-Gammon et al, 1994).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kuhl

Meltzoff

1996

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

429

302

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Infants' development of speech begins with a language-universal pattern of production that eventually becomes language specific. One mechanism contributing to this change is vocal imitation. The present study was undertaken to examine developmental change in infants' vocalizations in response to adults' vowels at 12, 16, and 20 weeks of age and test for vocal imitation. Two methodological aspects of the experiment are noteworthy: (a) three different vowel stimuli (/a/, /i/, and /u/) were videotaped and presented to infants by machine so that the adult model could not artifactually influence infant utterances, and (b) infants' vocalizations were analyzed both physically, using computerized spectrographic techniques, and perceptually by trained phoneticians who transcribed the utterances. The spectrographic analyses revealed a developmental change in the production of vowels. Infants' vowel categories become more separated in vowel space from 12 to 20 weeks of age. Moreover, vocal imitation was documented. Infants listening to a particular vowel produced vocalizations resembling that vowel. A hypothesis is advanced extending Kuhl's native language magnet (NLM) model to encompass infants' speech production. It is hypothesized that infants listening to ambient language store perceptually derived representations of the speech sounds they hear which in turn serve as targets for the production of speech utterances. NLM unifies previous findings on the effects of ambient language experience on infants' speech perception and the findings reported here that short-term laboratory experience with speech is sufficient to influence infants' speech production.

show abstract

Discernible differences in the babbling of infants according to target language

Cited by 170 publications

References 10 publications

The relationship between reduplicated babble onset and laterality biases in infant rhythmic arm movements

The relationship between reduplicated babble onset and laterality biases in infant rhythmic arm movements

Speech sound acquisition, coarticulation, and rate effects in a neural network model of speech production.

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

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About