Early Speech Production

Stages of Early Vocal Development

1) reflexive crying & vegetative sounds. 2) cooing. 3) vocal play/expansion stage 4) reduplicated/canonical babbling 5) variegated babbling

Cooing

Elicited by social interaction @ ~ 2 months start figuring out vocal tract, starting with longer vowels & then shorten them

Vocal play/Expansion stage

~ 4-7 months produce longer more complex series of sounds with increasing repertoire. Start using the back of mouth (K,g) then move on to front (m, b ).

Reduplicated/canonical Babbling

~ 6-9 months repetition of string of syllables (dadada) without any referential ( meaningful intentions) just practicing sounds

Variegated babbling

~ 10 - 14 months use more sounds & sound combos, with proper prosody contours without reduplication. Jargon

Jargon

Sounds or words that make no sense but sound like proper speech

Mampe et al 2009 cry patterns

Babies mimic the prosody of pitch pattern they heard in the womb of their native language

Video of 12 month olds jargon phase

Tuned the prosody to sound like conversing; picked up statement /question intonations

Influences on babbling

Biological programming, experience and social interactions

Biological programming

Timetable, progression, deaf babies babble orally

Timetable

Consistent trajectory through the stages regardless of experience

Progression

Start in the back of the mouth & then move to the front

Deaf begin to babble orally

Despite the lack of auditory input, babies still enter the canonical babbling stage & then differentiate

Experience proof factors

Babbling drift, deaf infants show reduced oral babbling, all infants babble with hands when exposed to sign

Experience

Discover correspondence between movements of vocal apparatus & resulting sounds while comparing adult speech to own vocal output

Babbling drift

~ 6-8 months babbling sounds start to sound more like native language

Kuhl & meltzoff auditory-articulatory map

Babies have initial mapping, can map basic sounds on to articulation

Role of social interaction

Contingent social interactions influences production

Goldstein etal 2003

Having positive reinforcement motivates more mature productions