Deaf children and children with Down’s Syndrome, however, also babble in the same way as ‘normal’ children. This suggests that babbling may not be an indicator of the child’s future speech skills, and therefore pronunciations in early speech may not correspond to their babbling preferences. The fact that deaf children do babble supports the Chomskian theory that language is an innate human ability.
Children’s early pronunciations tend to display common characteristics. To a non-linguist adult speaker, it would appear that children are making mistakes when they do not use adult pronunciations. There are, however, logical explanations for these differences.
The first explanation relates to the development of the child’s acoustic-articulatory system. That is, their ability to be able to produce and hear sounds. As discussed, deaf babies do babble, but do not develop ‘normal’ speech. This shows the importance of auditory feedback and suggests that hearing the speech of those around them helps to develop their language skills. When babbling, babies may be making an attempt to imitate the sounds produced by those they come into contact with. If they are unable to hear sounds being made, they have nothing to imitate or use as a ‘bench-mark’ to assess how close their efforts are to the target pronunciation. They will not develop ‘normal’ language because they do not know what it sounds like.
The child’s ability to be able to produce certain sounds is one of the most important reasons that their early speech is different to adults’. Some of the prominent features of children’s early pronunciations are the tendencies to alter the consonant and vowel patterns in adult speech to suit their needs. This is generally done in three ways:
- Substituting the final consonant with a vowel;
- Adding an extra vowel (either at the end or in the middle of words);
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Deletion of the final consonant E.g ‘cat’ (adult target // as opposed to child’s version //)
The first two instances are consonant cluster simplifications. For example, in the word ‘egg’ (adult target //), the consonant cluster at the end is simplified by adding a vowel to produce //. Also, in the word ‘blue’ (adult target /:/), the consonant cluster // is simplified by adding a vowel to produce /:/. This shows that early speech is related to babbling preference because by adding the extra vowel, the child is converting the C-C-V-V pattern of ‘blue’ to the pattern they favoured in babbling (C-V-C-V).
The issue of complexity of sound production greatly influences the way in which first words are pronounced. Children delete whole unstressed syllables to make words less complicated to pronounce. For example, they may pronounce ‘tomato’ (adult target /:/) as /:/ by deleting the unstressed syllable //. The meaning is not lost, as it is the stressed syllable that contains the most meaning.
It is also easier for children to produce vowels because they are a free flow of air through the mouth, with no involvement of any articulators as there is in the pronunciation of consonants. This is particularly important because, even in early speech, children do not have full muscular control and co-ordination to enable them to use the correct pronunciations.
The Jean Aitchison view that “Comprehension outstrips performance” is illustrated using an example from Berko & Brown (1960) where a child refers to a plastic fish as ‘fis’. When asked several times by an observer ‘Is this your fis?’ the child responded ‘No – my fis’. This continued until the observer asked ‘Is this your fish’, to which the child responded ‘Yes, my fis’. Here, the child understood the differences in pronunciation of ‘fis’ and fish’, but was unable to use the correct pronunciation himself. This shows that the child’s phonological understanding develops more quickly than they are able to produce these sounds.
These characteristics of early speech can be traced to babbling, were the child produces sounds in a C-V-C-V pattern. It also shows that babbling must influence why their pronunciation is different to adults’. It cannot be purely down to external factors, as adults do not often use these pronunciations. The exception to this, of course, is child directed speech – where adults simplify the language and pronunciations they use to imitate children’s early pronunciations. This alone is not enough to account for children using such pronunciations as they are exposed to normal adult speech even when it is not directed at them.
The fact that children’s early speech is different to adults is often related to the level of visibility – i.e. if the child can see a sound being produced, they are more likely to master its production earlier. Sounds produced at the front of the mouth, for example labials such as //, // and // are visible to the child – they can see how the articulators (lips) move to enable sound production and can therefore try to imitate this action.
This may explain pronunciations such as // (‘tub’). The child’s babbling preferences are also apparent here, because labials are among the most common sounds produced in babbling. Again, the child can see them being produced, so attempts to imitate and master them. When the child has acquired the ability to produce these sounds successfully, they substitute them in the place of sounds that are harder to produce.
This may also explain why even deaf children can babble – they are able to see the movements when adults talk to them, and – like ‘normal’ children – they try to imitate these movements. MacNeilage (1998) suggests that
“…what we perceive as consonantal and vocalic elements, are considered to be mere consequences of the opening/closing phases of mandibular oscillations…”
This means that the fact that actual sounds are produced may be passively linked to the movements of the mouth. The closing phase produces consonantal sounds, and the opening produces vocalic sounds – which would result in the C-V-C-V pattern emerging, for example “baba”. Therefore, babies may not actually be practising sounds whilst babbling, but merely imitating movements. This suggests that early pronunciation is not linked to the child’s babbling preferences.
The ‘babbling drift hypothesis’ (Brown 1958:199), however, states that
“…the most important thing about babbling is the fact that it drifts in the direction of the speech the infant hears.”
This supports the idea that early speech is linked to babbling, as it has been found that there are phonological differences between the babbling of babies from different countries. The child’s babbling changes according to which sounds occur in their language, and therefore these preferences must influence early word pronunciations.
In young children’s early pronunciations, the places and manner of articulation of some sounds are altered to make it simpler for the child to produce. For example, very often children will use stops where fricatives would be present in the adult target. E.g. ‘zebra’ would be replaced by ‘debra’ – the fricative // is replaced by the stop //. This is reflected in babbling because around 90% of the sounds produced are stops, compared to 10% fricatives. It is much easier for the child to produce stop sounds as less effort is needed – they involve only a simple short burst of air.
Conclusion
It is obvious that early pronunciation is influenced by the child’s babbling preferences to some extent. This is the case because babbling allows the child to practice sounds and master them. Without this, they surely would not be able to speak at all.
The fact that the differences between adults and child’s pronunciation of words reflects the type of sounds used in babbling strongly suggests that early pronunciation does show some indication of babbling preferences.
However, taking into consideration the other factors discussed – such as the fact that deaf children also babble, I have come to the conclusion that there may be a continuous development from babbling through to adult speech. I believe that babbling is the start of the child’s speech development – every child has this innate ability. I also think that the extent of how well the child develops language depends on their acoustic-articulatory system and other external factors.
References
Brown, R. 1958. Words and things. Glencoe, Ill.:Free Press
Jackobson, R 1968. Child Language, Aphasia and Phonologic Universals. The Hague:Mouton
MacNeilage, P.F. 1979. Speech Production. (Taken from website <> Accessed April 2004).
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