From Babbling to Speech: A Re-Assessment of the Continuity Issue

On the Inseparability of Grammar and the Lexicon: Evidence from Acquisition, Aphasia and Real-time Processing

“…Furthermore, he suggested that the phonological content of babble (i.e., the consonants and vowels that children prefer) is quite distinct from the phonological content of first words. These were interesting ideas, but after 30 years of research on child phonology, we now know that Jakobson was wrong on both these points Menn, 1985;Vihman, Ferguson, & Elbert, 1986;Vihman & Greenlee, 1987;Vihman, Macken, Miller, Simmons, & Miller, 1985). There is no silent period, and the specific sounds that individual children prefer in their prelexical babble tend to predominate in the same child's first attempts at meaningful speech.…”

“…Furthermore, this continuous flow is not unidirectional. Leonard (Leonard, Newhoff, & Mesalam, 1980;Schwartz, 1978), Vihman et al (1985) and others have proposed that there is a tight bidirectional relationship between babbling and early lexical development, and that the child's first word templates (probably appearing first in comprehension) serve as targets for complex babble. Furthermore, Werker (1994) and Werker and Tees (1984) have shown that infants begin to home in on the consonant phonemes of their native language between 8 and 12 months of age.…”

The sources of phonological knowledge: a cross-linguistic perspective

“…And what is the mechanism behind selected pattern production? We know that individual children differ in their vocal patterns (e.g., Stoel-Gammon & Cooper, 1984;Vihman et al, 1986;Vihman, 1993) and that, furthermore, differences in early word patterns can to some extent be traced to differences in individual vocal practice, or babbling (Vihman et al, 1985). It has long been accepted that children "avoid" word patterns that do not fit their existing phonetic repertoire (cf.…”

“…Despite Jakobson's well-known view (1941/68) to the effect that the babbling sounds produced in the prelinguistic period are wholly unrelated to the speech sounds found in early word forms, continuity between babbling and speech has been firmly established for many years now. Studies bringing clear empirical evidence to bear on the question have involved both the general patterning of babble in relation to early word production (Oller et al, 1976) and the particular babbling of individual children in relation to their own first word forms (Vihman et al, 1985); more recently, first signed words have also been found to be rooted in prelinguistic gesture (Cheek et al, 2001). …”

Do production patterns influence the processing of speech in prelinguistic infants?

“…This is a novel paradigm that fills a gap resulting from the fact that typical infant speech perception experiments are based upon large numbers of infants seen in the lab for a single session, while infant vocal production studies typically involve a small number of infants followed intensively over a long period of time. In the current study production was documented with multiple observations of infant-caregiver interactions via recordings and transcription (following Vihman, Macken, Miller, Simmons & Miller, 1985) and perception was tested using the Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP) (Kemler-Nelson et al, 1995), which quantifies infantsÕ response to speech as either a familiarity or a novelty effect reflected in looking times. This enabled us to identify well-practiced consonants in individual infants and, through the use of individually designed stimuli, to test for a link between production and perception.…”