In young children's early pronunciations of words we can see traces of their babbling preferences. Discuss this statement and say whether you think it accounts for why their pronunciations are different from adults'.

Authors Avatar

Leanne Waddington

Linguistics 1080 – Linguistics 2

In young children’s early pronunciations of words we can see traces of their babbling preferences. Discuss this statement and say whether you think it accounts for why their pronunciations are different from adults’.

Introduction

In early speech, young children don’t always appear to use ‘correct’ pronunciations of words. My argument will show that these are not simply ‘mistakes’, but the differences between child and adult pronunciations are related to the phonological preferences of children’s babbling.

To do this I will look at children’s physical capability to produce sounds, why some sounds are substituted by others, and external influences on the development from babbling to early speech.

Babbling is a pre-linguistic stage of communication, and on average occurs when babies are around six to twelve months old.

Development from babbling to early speech

Babbling contains syllable-type sounds, combining what appear to be consonants (C) and vowels (V) in a way that makes it appear to imitate the patterns of adult speech. In a sense, it has structure and is not merely a random set of sounds. Often babbling is seen as a baby’s way of practicing the sounds they hear in their environment. Also, the sounds produced while in the babbling stage are often the most frequent and simplistic sound patterns present in the language they are exposed to.

There are two stages to babbling – reduplicated and variegated. Reduplicated babbling is the earliest stage, where the child repeats the same sequence of sounds, for example “baba” and “gaga”. Variegated babbling is the later stage, and involves combining different sounds sequences such as “paba” and “badaga”. Both of these types of babbling follow the C-V-C-V pattern preferred by young children. This appears to support the theory that babbling is the practicing of sounds, as through reduplicated babbling they are able to master certain sets of sounds, and combine them together in different sequences when they are more confident (variegated).

It also shows that babbling and early speech are linked, because if children did not master the art of producing sounds during babbling, they would not suddenly be able to produce sounds in the way adults do. Jackobson’s (1968/1941) ideas about there being a continuous development from babbling through to adult speech also supports the view that sounds produced in babbling will directly affect pronunciations in early speech.

Join now!

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 ...

This is a preview of the whole essay