The vocalizations of infants.

Abstract

The incomprehensible vocalizing and babbling of infants and the final emergence of true language from this prolonged period of practice have attracted the attention of writers in many fields, and particularly those in the field of child study. The bulk of the literature on this topic consists of a large group of semi-scientific observational studies of a biographical nature, which appeared during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first part of the present century. Many of these records are concerned, not only with language development but also with motor, social, and emotional development. Other studies, however, are much more defined in purpose, and are somewhat narrower in scope, being confined to the study of the child's acquisition of language. The studies which give adequate reports of the very early stages, however, are much less numerous than those which are concerned chiefly with the period immediately following the appearance of the first word. Unfortunately, the studies which involve the observation of many children under controlled conditions are very few in number and much needs to be done along this line.Previous Reviews: The literature on this topic has been brought together from time to time by various writers. Most of the available reviews, however, are concerned chiefly with the vocabulary studies 625 626 DOROTHEA McCARTHY on older children, and little or no space is devoted to the earliest stages of linguistic babbling. They consist chiefly of tabulations of all reports on the appearance of the first word, or of tabular comparisons of different vocabulary counts. In 1833 Feldman (15) gave such a review based on the records of 33 children. The mode of this group for the appearance of the first word was at sixteen months. In 1883 a very brief review of foreign studies was given by Sikorski (55). Preyer (48) in reporting his son's progress in language compares it with the earlier reports in the literature, particularly those of Stumpf (62), Lindner (32 and 33), Sigismund (54), and others. In 1891 Sanford (50) gave a very brief and incomplete summary of what had been done in the field up to that time. Tracy (67) in 1893 gave a vei-y clear and complete summary' of the studies of children's language up to two years of age. He calls it " an outline history of the speech-progress of the average child during the first two years, generalizing from a large number of observations made by different persons on different children." While it is difficult to combine the records from these biographical studies because of the different methods of observation, Tracy (67) has made the most satisfactory summary of the literature on these early stages. Neumann (39) gives an excellent discussion of the early anecdotal accounts in the foreign literature, particularly those of Ament (2), Lindner (32 and 33), Gheorgor (20), and others. In 1907 Clara and William Stern in their book called Children's Speech (58), gave an excellent account of all the observations on German children as well as on children of ...

Experimental methods used in studies on infant reactions since 1900.

“…Sherman (86,87) had infant cries, subsequent upon stimulation, judged by students as to emotional connotation. McCarthy (66), in a careful review of devices useful in recording sound responses objectively, suggested the photographing of sound waves and the use of victrola and dictaphone records.…”

Methods for eliciting, annotating, and analyzing databases for child speech development

“…That is, decades before Oller et al (1976) and Vihman et al (1985) definitely refuted Jakobson's (1941) hypothesized discontinuity between children's prespeech babbling and their early speech, astute observers already recognized differences in an infant's vocalizations at different ages, with later babbling hardly distinguishable from vocalizations that are recognized by the parents as the infant's first words. These early 20th-century researchers also were keenly aware of the technological limitations of the time, pointing both to “the difficulty of stimulating vocal responses” during a testing interval dedicated to focused observation of vocalization type (Shirley, 1931, p. 47) and to the fact that “the cries and various vocalizations of the infant which are preliminary to the complexities of language proper include many sounds for which we have no adequate written symbols” (McCarthy, 1929b, p. 636).…”

Speech Development of Infants

“…When we consider this developmental process in terms of mere direction, it seems to match partly with Shultz' and McCarthy's theories; the first stage from back to front accords with McCarthy's and the second development from front to back does with Shultz's. But, if it can be considered to be a difference of level among the first back guttural, and the front labial dental and second back guttural sounds, (namely, the first back guttural is taken not as an articulation but a physiological utterance which is undifferenciated and needs less effort, while the front labial, dental and second back guttural are articulations which are differenciated and require more efforts) the whole developmental process can be explained by either Shultz's "law of least efforts (20), or McCarthy's "the individuation of specific finer movement" (16). * As regards the utterance time, not only each sound duration but also the intervals between sounds become shorter in the babbling stage.…”