Linguistic significance of babbling: evidence from a tracheostomized infant

Abstract

The role of babbling in language development is not well understood. One source of evidence is the utterances of infants who were tracheostomized during the period in which they would normally have produced syllabic vocalization. We describe here the phonetic patterns and linguistic development of a girl called Jenny. She was tracheostomized and generally aphonic from o;5-1 ;8 but cognitively and socially normal, with near-normal comprehension of language. Acoustic analyses of Jenny's utterances following decannulation revealed a tenth of the canonical syllables which might be expected in normally developing infants, an extremely small inventory of consonant-like segments, and a marked preference for labial obstruents. In these ways, she resembled a group of infants of the same age who also cannot hear their oral-motor movements, the congenitally deaf, suggesting that the audibility of babbling contributes to its onset. Two months following decannulation, when Jenny was I ; I O , she produced only a handful of different words. We think this is because aphonia prevented her from discovering the referential value of vocal expression and discouraged the formation of a phonetic repertoire that could be appropriated for lexical [•] The authors are grateful to Jenny and her parents for their co-operation. We also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Jenny's physician, Joseph Hallett, and her speech-language pathologist, Susan Thompson. Members of our own research team, including Sarah Hamlin and especially Jeni Yamada, assisted in observing, testing, and recording; Corine Bickley helped with the acoustic analysis. We are indebted to Oiler and Eilers (1988) for permission to adapt their Fig. 2, and to Bruce Smith for editorial comments.

Vocalization Rate and Consonant Production in Toddlers at High and Low Risk for Autism

“…Research has shown that children who are prevented from babbling by tracheostomy but who are language-normal do show lower rates of canonical babbling and delays in consonant acquisition (Bleile, Stark, & Silverman McGowan, 1993;Locke & Pearson, 1990). However, the present results demonstrate that the relationship between vocalization rate and number of different consonants is complex, nonlinear, and furthermore can differ between different groups of children.…”

A new view of language acquisition

“…This is true both for humans, who do not learn spoken language (or even babble normally) if they are deaf (87), and also for song birds (88). Production plays a role in normal language development; infants tracheostomized at the time at which they normally would babble show abnormal patterns of development that persist (89). These cases illustrate the strong dependency between perception and production and suggest why speech motor patterns learned early in life become difficult to alter later.…”

Relationship between Rhythmic Behavior and Canonical Babbling in Infant Vocal Development

“…Recently, Clement and Koopmans-van Beinum [1995] compared 6 deaf with 6 hearing infants and found differences in their sound production even within their first half-year. A case study of a tracheotomized infant suggests that auditory experience is crucial to vocal learning [Locke and Pearson, 1990]. The subject was tracheotomized at 5 months and failed to babble or speak until the decannulation at 20 months of age.…”