Infant Speech: Development of Vowel Sounds

Irwin, Orvis C.

doi:10.1044/jshd.1301.31

Cited by 52 publications

(22 citation statements)

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“…Empirical studies have, however, evaluated the third and fourth tenets, i.e., segmental exuberance and discontinuity from early words, and have clearly refuted both. The range of consonant-like elements in infant babbling, across numerous language environments, is quite restricted rather than broadly inclusive (e.g., Cruttendon, 1970; Irwin, 1947, 1948; Kent & Murray, 1982; Matyear, MacNeilage & Davis, 1998). In addition, empirical evidence clearly shows continuity and similarity, rather than discontinuity, between babbling and true words, regardless of whether group patterns or individual idiosyncrasies are tracked over early development.…”

Section: Infant Attunement To Native Speech: What Do We Know?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Articulating What Infants Attune to in Native Speech

Best

Goldstein

Nam

et al. 2016

Ecological Psychology

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To become language users, infants must embrace the integrality of speech perception and production. That they do so, and quite rapidly, is implied by the native-language attunement they achieve in each domain by 6–12 months. Yet research has most often addressed one or the other domain, rarely how they interrelate. Moreover, mainstream assumptions that perception relies on acoustic patterns whereas production involves motor patterns entail that the infant would have to translate incommensurable information to grasp the perception-production relationship. We posit the more parsimonious view that both domains depend on commensurate articulatory information. Our proposed framework combines principles of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and Articulatory Phonology (AP). According to PAM, infants attune to articulatory information in native speech and detect similarities of non-native phones to native articulatory patterns. The AP premise that gestures of the speech organs are the basic elements of phonology offers articulatory similarity metrics, while satisfying the requirement that phonological information be discrete and contrastive: 1) distinct articulatory organs produce vocal tract constrictions; 2) phonological contrasts recruit different articulators, and/or constrictions of a given articulator that differ in degree or location. Various lines of research suggest young children perceive articulatory information, which guides their productions: discrimination of between- versus within-organ contrasts; simulations of attunement to language-specific articulatory distributions; multi-modal speech perception; oral/vocal imitation; perceptual effects of articulator activation or suppression. We conclude that articulatory gesture information serves as the foundation for developmental integrality of speech perception and production. … each blind man felt a part of the animal in his reach, reporting that it was like a wall; a snake; a tree; a fan … “Each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong”(Saxe, 1873, pp. 135–136)

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Section: Infant Attunement To Native Speech: What Do We Know?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Articulating What Infants Attune to in Native Speech

Best

Goldstein

Nam

et al. 2016

Ecological Psychology

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“…In addition, use of the dynamic time warping (DTW) based approach is presented to investigate the class seperability of different cry modes through the nature of the optimal warping path in DTW algorithm. Other significant studies in infant cry analysis literature are reported in [2,4,7,[9][10][11][12]14,16,18,20,28,32,38,40,43,50,53,55,56]. …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“Cry Baby”: Using Spectrographic Analysis to Assess Neonatal Health Status from an Infant’s Cry

Patil

2010

Advances in Speech Recognition

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Infant cry analysis is a multidisciplinary area of research incorporating pediatrics, neurology, physiology, engineering, developmental linguistics, and psychology. It has been proposed in the pediatric literature that the infant cry is a reflection of complex neurophysiologic functions and that analysis of the cry itself can be used to assess the status of the infant's health. Given the diagnostic importance of infant cry, this chapter presents application of spectrographic analysis to the vocal sounds of an infant, comparing normal with abnormal infant cry. Drawing from a rich body of research on spectrographic analysis predominantly used for performance of speaker recognition, this chapter presents how such spectral features that are used to identify and verify speakers can be applied to assess the neonate's health status, by comparing a normal to an abnormal cry. Ten distinct cry modes, viz., hyperphonation, dysphonation, inhalation, double harmonic break, trailing, vibration, weak vibration, flat, rising, and falling have been identified for normal infant cry and their spectrographic patterns were observed. This analysis was then extended to abnormal infant cry. It has been observed that the double harmonic break is more dominant for abnormal infant cry in cases of myalgia (muscular pain). The inhalation pattern is distinct for infants suffering from asthma or other respiratory ailments such as a cough or cold. For example, for the infant whose larynx is not well developed, the pitch harmonics are nearly absent. As such, there are no voicing or glottal vibrations in the cry signal. In addition, for infants with Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE), there is an initial tendency of pitch harmonics to rise and then to be followed by a blurring of such harmonics. Finally, an infant cry classification system is analyzed by observing the nature of the optimal warping path in the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm.

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“…For example, in an early study of vowel development based on transcriptions of the vocalizations from 95 English-learning infants (Irwin, 1948), mid-front [E, I] and mid-central (e) vowels accounted for over 70 % of vowel production during the first year. This section reviews universal and language-specific characteristics in vowel production from cross-linguistic studies and those on the acquisition of Mandarin vowels.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Segmental production in Mandarin-learning infants

Chen

Kent

2009

J. Child Lang.

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The early development of vocalic and consonantal production in Mandarin-learning infants was studied at the transition from babbling to producing first words. Spontaneous vocalizations were recorded for 24 infants grouped by age: G1 (0 ; 7 to 1 ; 0) and G2 (1 ; 1 to 1 ; 6). Additionally, the infant-directed speech of 24 caregivers was recorded during natural infant-adult interactions to infer language-specific effects. Data were phonetically transcribed according to broad categories of vowels and consonants. Vocalic development, in comparison with reports for children of other linguistic environments, exhibited two universal patterns: the prominence of [symbol: see text] and [symbol: see text], and the predominance of low and mid vowels over high vowels. Language-specific patterns were also found, e.g. the early appearance and acquisition of low vowels [symbol: see text]. Vowel production was similar in G1 and G2, and a continuum of developmental changes brought infants' vocalization closer to the adult model. Consonantal development showed two universal patterns: labials and alveolars occurred more frequently than velars; and nasals developed earlier than fricatives, affricates and liquids. We also found two language-specific patterns: alveolars were more prominent than labials and affricates developed early. Universal and language-specific characteristics in G1 continued to be prominent in G2. These data indicate that infants are sensitive to the ambient language at an early age, and this sensitivity influences the nature of their vocalizations.

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Infant Speech: Development of Vowel Sounds

Cited by 52 publications

References 0 publications

Articulating What Infants Attune to in Native Speech

Articulating What Infants Attune to in Native Speech

“Cry Baby”: Using Spectrographic Analysis to Assess Neonatal Health Status from an Infant’s Cry

Segmental production in Mandarin-learning infants

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