Speech Development: Infants to Toddlers Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering key speech development milestones, phonetic concepts, anatomical characteristics, and language acquisition stages in infants and toddlers.

Categorical Perception

The ability to divide the speech stream into individual sounds and identify individual phonemes (e.g., segmenting "hat" into /h/, /ae/, /t/).

Statistical Learning

The cognitive ability to detect and extract regularities, sound patterns, and structural rules present in a native language.

Reflexive Vocalizations

Unintentional vocal sounds occurring from $0-2$ months due to the position of articulators upon exhaling, such as reflexive crying in response to stimuli like hunger or discomfort.

Cooing

Early vocalizations occurring between $2-4$ months consisting of vowel-like sounds and back-of-the-throat sound approximations (e.g., /k/, /g/).

Infant Vocal Tract Anatomy

An anatomical configuration where the high position of the larynx brings the epiglottis into close contact with the soft palate, restricting early tongue movement and control.

Vocal Play

A stage of speech development from $4-6$ months where infants experiment with their articulators, producing speech sounds and non-speech sounds like raspberries.

Canonical Babbling

Speech production occurring between $6-10$ months involving mature consonants, full vowels, and smooth transitions in reduplicated (e.g., "mamama") or non-reduplicated (e.g., "ba da da") syllable combinations.

Variegated Babbling

Babbling occurring from $10-12$ months ("jargon") characterized by varied vowel-consonant combinations produced with adult-like intonation patterns.

Parentese

Modified speech input used by caregivers (also called Motherese or Fatherese) featuring higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, repetitions, and shared attention to support infant speech and language development.

Phonetic Inventory

The range of speech sounds—including consonants, vowels, and syllable structures—that a child is capable of producing.

Stops (Manner of Articulation)

Consonants produced with maximum constriction and full closure of the oral cavity by the articulators (e.g., /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/).

Glides (Manner of Articulation)

Consonants produced with the least constriction, where articulators approximate and then open into a vowel-like vocal tract (e.g., /w/, /h/).

Open Syllables

Syllable structures or words that end in a vowel sound rather than a consonant (e.g., V, CV, CVCV).

Closed Syllables

Syllable structures or words that end in a consonant sound (e.g., CVC).

Vowel Quadrilateral

A four-sided diagram representing tongue position during vowel production based on tongue height (high, mid, low) and tongue advancement (front, central, back).

Non-rhotic Vowel Acquisition

The development of non-r-colored vowels, of which toddlers correctly produce approximately $80\%$ between $18-24$ months, typically acquiring corner vowels before mid vowels.

Consonant Inventory Development (Stoel-Gammon, 1985)

The progression of consonant production in toddlers: $3$ initial consonants at $15$ months; $6$ initial and $1$ final (/t/) at $18$ months; and $11$ initial and $6$ final consonants at $24$ months.

Toddler Vocabulary Growth

The rapid expansion of expressive vocabulary from $2-3$ words at approximately $12-13$ months to around $200$ words by $24$ months.