PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

Melissa BucoIrish De OcampoMariz EncarnacionRuth Espiritu

PRELINGUISTIC SPEECH PERCEPTION

Do babies learn the ability to discriminate speech sounds during the process of learning a language, or are they already equipped with that ability?

How are perceptual abilities important to language learning?

Are babies deaf when they are born?

How can we study the perceptual abilities of infants?

Are babies able to discriminate the sounds that they hear?

How extensive is an infant’s ability to distinguish phoneme and non-phoneme sounds?

Is the perceptual ability of humans a species-specific ability?

PRELINGUISTIC SPEECH SOUND DEVELOPMENT

STAGES OF PRESPEECH VOCAL DEVELOPMENT

0-2 months(0-6 weeks)

Reflexive crying, vegetative sounds (coughs, sneezes), Sounds reflecting their physical state.

2-5 months(6-16 weeks)

Cooing and laughter. Early consonants develop, sounds from the back of throat, laughs and giggles form (to the enjoyment of parents).

4-6 months(16-30 weeks)

Vocal play, babbling gets more adult-like, range and pitch play,, bilabial trills are common (raspberries).

6-12 months Reduplicated babbling ex: mamama, pitch control develops, ability to sound out some consonants and vowels.

9-18 months Non-reduplicative babbling, varying of consonants and vowels.

• Reflexive crying and Vegetative sounds

– In crying and in making these vegetative sounds, an infant’s vocal cords vibrate, and the airflow through the vocal apparatus is stopped and started. Thus, even these unpromising sounds include features that will later be used to produce speech sounds

• Cooing and laughter

– Coos- sounds that babies make when they appear to be happy and contented

– Social interaction- elicit cooing

– 1st laughter- around the age of 16 weeks

• Vocal play

– Also known as the Expansion Stage (Oller, 1980)

– During this stage, the variety of different consonant-like and vowel-like sounds that infants produce increases.

– Marginal babbling- long series of sounds that infants produce by the end of this expansion stage

– Other noises include: squeals, growls, friction noises

– 1st recognizable consonant-like sounds- heard at around 2 to 3 months, and are usually the velars

– Around 6 months- infants start to produce consonant-like sounds articulated in the front of the mouth (bilabials and alveolars)

• Reduplicated babbling

– Also known as Canonical Babbling, is distinguished from the vocalizations that precede it by the presence of true syllables, and these syllables are typically produced in reduplicated series of the same consonant and vowel combination.

– The appearance of canonical babbling is a major landmark in the infant’s prespeech development. It is the first development that distinguishes the vocal development of hearing children from that of deaf children.

• Nonreduplicated babbling

– Also known as Variegated Babbling

– The range of consonants and vowels infants produce expands further.

– Infants combine different consonant + vowel and consonant + vowel + consonant syllables into series.

– Prosody- the intonation contour of speech

– Jargon- wordless sentences

– Intonation babies- children who produce a great deal of jargon and who do so for a long time (Dore, 1975)

– Word babies- children who produce relatively little jargon and who move quickly on to learning the words to the tune (Dore, 1975)

INFLUENCE OF THE TARGET LANGUAGE ON BABBLING

– Universal- even the particular sounds that babies produce are similar across environments

– Babbling drift- as early as 6 months, the sounds that babies produce are somewhat influenced by the language that they hear (R. Brown, 1958)

– 2 techniques:

1) To use the judgments of competent speakers to determine whether they can tell the differences among the babblings of babies who are acquiring different languages.

2) To record babblings of children who are acquiring different languages and analyze them for the presence and frequency of features in the respective adult languages

• De Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, and Durand (1984)- 1st technique

• De Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, and Durand (1984)- 2nd

technique

– By the end of the babbling stage, children have made great progress from their first vowels to an increasingly large repertoire of consonants and then to knowing something about the prosody and sound patterns of their target language.

– Children’s vocalizations at this point are most frequently single syllables, with some two-syllable productions.

THE TRANSITION FROM BABBLING TO WORDS

BABBLING FIRST WORD

TRANSITIONAL PERIOD

Children produce their own invented words. These invented words are soaund sequences children use with consistent meanings but that bear no discernible resemblance to the sound of any word in the target language.

• Transitional forms

– Protowords

– Sensorimotor morphemes

– Quasiwords

– Phonetically consistent forms

– Often express broad meanings, and their use tends either to be tightly bound to particular contexts or to serve particular functions.

– Stage of vocal development overlaps with the use of communicative gestures

PROCESSES UNDERLYING INFANTS’ DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH SOUNDS

• Nervous system maturation

• Experience

1) Hearing the speech adults produce

2) Infants’ experience hearing their own vocal output

TRIVIA• A baby’s first form of communication

is:

CRYING SMILING

TRIVIA

• To be “bulol” in early years is normal.

– True

– False

TRIVIA

• Children stop babbling when they learn to speak words.

– True

– False

PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT ONCE SPEECH BEGINS

Word Learning

• Very young children fail to distinguish newly taught words that differ only by one segment

• Multiple demands of the word-learning task do not leave the child with sufficient resources to register all the phonetic details of newly encountered words

Word Recognition

• It is usually believed that children only have rough representations; they are less sensitive to differences between words at the level phonetic segments and base their judgments on syllables or whole words.

• However, more recent evidence suggests that children do represent words they know in some phonetic detail, such as when they show sensitivity to small mispronunciations.

Word Production

First Words

• simple syllable structure: either single syllables or reduplicated syllables

ex. mama, dada

• small inventory of vowels and consonants

• sounds most common in children’s babble were also most common in early vocabularies

• some sounds in the adult language were noticeably absent in children’s productions

/m/, /b/,/d/- present

/ð/,/Ѳ/,/r/,/l/- absent

• It has been proposed that early word representations are of the whole, rather than as separate phonemic segments

-lack of consistency in the ways children produce sounds during this stage

-phonemic idioms- words the child produces in a very adultlikeway, while still incorrectly producing other words that use the very same sounds

The Development of Phonological Processes

• at around 18 months of age, children’s productions become more consistent, though not adultlike

• phonological processes- develop systematic ways in which they alter the sounds of the target language so that they fit within the range of sounds they can produce

• whole word

Reduplication

• individual segments

Assimilation

ex. “doggy” /dɑgij/ “goggy” /gɑgij/

“self” /sɛlf/ “felf” /fɛlf/

Denasalization

ex. “jam” /dʒæm/ “jab” /dʒæb/

“sing” /sɪŋ/ “sig” /sɪg/

Gliding

ex. “look” /lʊk/ “wook” /wʊk/

Reduction (consonant clusters)

ex. “school” /skul/ “kool” /kul/

“bring” /brɪŋ/ “bing” /bɪŋ/

Deletion

ex. “boot” /but/ “boo” /bu/

“away” /əwej/ “way” /wej/

“butterfly” /bʌtərflaj/ “bufly” /bʌflaj/

Multiple processes

ex. “giraffe” /dʒəræf/ “faffe” /fæf/

/dʒəræf/ /ræf/

/ræf/ /fæf/

• strategies:

-avoid acquiring new words that use sounds that they can’t produce

-assimilate a new word either to another similar-sounding word or to a pre-existing sound-pattern (ex. VC,CV, CVC, CVCV)

• the need for these processes decline gradually declines as children become able to produce more and more of the sounds of the target language

The Relation Between Perception and Production

• children demonstrate awareness of the difference between their own pronunciation of a word and the adult pronunciation

• ‘fis’ phenomenon

Child: “Gimme my guk!”

Father: “You mean your duck?”

Child: “Yes, my guk!”

Father (hands child the duck): “Okay, here’s your guk.”

Child (annoyed): “No, Daddy -I say it that way, not you.”

• children’s mispronunciations do not necessarily imply that children have incomplete mental representations of how the word is supposed to sound

Cross-Linguistic Differences in Phonological Development

• the order in which sounds appear in children’s speech is influenced by properties of the target language

-ex. /v/ is a relatively late-appearing sound for children acquiring English, but not for those acquiring Swedish, Bulgarian, and Estonian

• the function different speech sounds serve in the language is another important factor

• it is not the frequency with which children hear the sound but rather the frequency with which the sound is used in different words

-ex. the and this (/ð/)

Individual Differences in Phonological Development

• difference in rate of development

• difference in the particular sounds produced

• difference in the approaches children take to constructing a phonological system

The Development of Phonological Awareness

• phonological awareness- being able to rhyme, count syllables, and think of different words that being with a particular sound

• children show some signs of phonological awareness beginning around 2 years old

• central importance in considering the relation between oral language and literacy

-children’s levels of phonological awareness predict their success in learning to read

THE RELATION BETWEEN PHONOLOGICAL AND LEXICAL

DEVELOPMENT

Issue: Does children’s knowledge of the sounds of their language influence their acquisition of words and does their knowledge of words influence their knowledge of sounds?

Evidences

1. Lexical selection

• items in the child's vocabulary are fit to the repertoire of the sounds they can produce

-i.e. mama, papa (mother/ father)

- child's phonetic inventory directly proportional to size of vocabulary

2. Lexical development causes drives phonological development

• From vague and global representations, word representations achieve full phonological detail once vocabularies acquire it

• the denser the neighborhood, the more distinct the sounds become to the child

• Definition of “neighborhood”

Explanations of Phonological Development

A. Behaviorist

Problems

1. not consider maturation process

2. non-selection of sound reinforcement from parents

3. acquisition of mental representations that are not unconscious

B. Rule and constraint based approach

- driving force of phonological development is not rules but constraints

- Phonological development consists of learning the ranking of

-constraints that applies in the language one is acquiring

C. Biologically based theories

- the initial sounds made are dependent on what the human vocal apparatus is inclined to make

- explains the similarities of the first sounds babies make at a certain age

Universality of Sounds

D. Usage based Phonology

- language input and use of the language

E. Cognitive Problem Solving Approach

- word representation is seen as a whole, and only after sufficient mental representations, word analysis becomes segmental with contrasting features

F. Connectionist Approach

- children try to approximate the target word and commits errors because of immature connections in the brain

/ Ѳɛnk ju/!!!