Module 6

Phonological Development

The Emergence of Speech

Key Concepts for Understanding
• Phonological awareness/knowledge
• Phonological boundaries
• Organs of articulation
• Pre-linguistic sounds
• Infant directed speech/motherese
• Phonetic features
• Models of phonological development
Points for Discussion
• The acquisition of phonology consists of
learning to distinguish and produce the
sound patterns of the adult language.
• It is also consists of learning and
coming to mentally represent the
structure underlying those sound
patterns.
 Pre-Linguistic Speech and
Development of Speech Perception
• It was thought that babies were deaf at birth
and that basic sensory abilities matures only
later.
• Infants’ hearing is not quite as sensitive as
adults but it is certainly adequate for hearing
speech from the time infants are born (Kuhl,
1987).
• The auditory system is already functioning in
the fetus even before birth.
On auditory system
• The fetus will move in utero in response to
external sound (Kuhl, 1987).
• On mothers’ voices based on the studies conducted by
DeCasper and Fifer (1980) and DeCasper and Spence
(1986)

• Fetuses seem not only to hear but to remember what

they hear. One group of researchers played recordings
of their mother’s and stranger’s voice to 38-week old
fetuses
• DeCasper and Spence (1986) had pregnant women
read a particular passage aloud every day during the
last 6 weeks of their pregnancy.
• Infants can discriminate essentially all the sound
contrasts languages use.

• The High-Amplitude Sucking (HAS) Technique

makes use of three characteristics of babies: (1)
Babies like to hear sounds, (2) babies lose interest in
a sound when it is presented repeatedly, and (3)
babies who have lost interest in a previously repeated
sound will become interested if a new sound is
presented.
• In the HAS procedure, interest is
measured by the baby’s willingness to
“work” to hear the sound played over a
speaker. (Hoff, 2009).
The Head-Turn Technique
• It is typically used with babies between 5 and
12 months old. This procedure makes use of
the fact that babies are interested in a moving
toy, such as a monkey that claps cymbals
together. Using the presentation of the
moving toy as a reward, babies can be trained
to turn their heads when they hear a change in
a sound being presented.
Infants’ Discrimination of Speech
Sounds
• Infants can discriminate essentially all the
sound contrasts languages use. For
example, infants as young as 4 weeks old
can discriminate vowel contrasts such
as /u/ versus /I/ and /I/ versus
/a/(Trehub, 1973) and consonants
contrasts such as /p/ versus /b/ and /d/
versus /g/ (Aslin, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1998).
Infant-Directed Speech
In many cultures, adults use a particular
way of speaking with babies (Fernald et
al., 1986). This style of speech is
sufficiently different from the way adults
talk to other adults that it has been given
its own name ---motherese or infant-
directed speech or child-directed speech
(Newport, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1977).

Please see page 6.

 Infant-Directed Speech as a
Universal Signal-System
• -assumed to be a special speech register for
talking to infants
• A substantial body of research has investigated
how infants respond to infant-directed speech
and what infants might learn from it. Several
findings make the case that infants prefer to
hear infant-directed over adult-directed speech
(Hoff, 2009).
• Anne Fernald (1985) recorded 10 different adult
women talking to their 4-month-old infants and
to an adult.
• Experiments conducted:
• 1. infant-directed speech tape to 4-month-old
infants

• Result:
• The infants chose to hear infant-directed speech
more frequently than they chose to hear the
adult-directed speech.

• Please see page 6.

When talking to babies, adults use higher-
pitched voice, a wider range of pitches,
longer pauses and shorter phrases (Fernald
et al., 1989).

• For 4-month-old babies, it seems to be exaggerated pitch

contours. Fernald and Kuhl (1987) found that the4-month-olds
preferred to hear infant-directed speech when everything but the
melody had been filtered out of the speech signal.

• Please see page 6.

Bold colors and black on white patterns
(study conducted by Vihman, 1996)
• It seems that mothers naturally produce sounds
that interest babies (Hoff, 2009).

• Please see pages4 (3).

• The Role of Infant-Directed Speech

• The infant-directed speech might also

support language acquisition by providing
particularly clean examples of the sounds
to be learned (Hoff, 2009).
 The Role of Infant-Directed Speech
• In addition to regulating attention and arousal,
infant-directed speech may also support the
language acquisition process.

• Laboratory tests conducted by Liu, Kuhl, &Tsao

in 2003.
• On one study, Hirsh-Pasek and associates
(1987) presented 7-10-month-old infants with
tape-recorded samples of child-directed speech
into which pauses had been inserted. In some
of the samples, the pauses had been inserted at
clause boundaries; for other samples, the
pauses had been inserted within clause.
• Subsequent study by Kemler-Nelson, Hirsh-
Pasek, Jusczyk, and Cassidy (1989) using the
same procedure

• Please see page 8.

Prosody
• According to Hoff (2009), prosody is the
intonation contour of speech.

• Please see page 5 (2).

Prosodic Bootstrapping Hypothesis
The proposal that infants find important clues to language
structure in the prosodic characteristics of the speech signal is
known Prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis.(Morgan & Demuth,
1996).

Prosodic features of speech, which tend to be exaggerated in speech

to children may provide cues to syntactic structure (Hoff, 2009).

Examples: Pauses and changes in the intonation tend to occur at

phrase boundaries (“Little Red Riding Hood pause lived with her
mother pause at the edge of the woods”). On pages 9-10
Phonological Bootstrapping
Hypothesis
• A more encompassing proposal, that
properties of the sound signal other than
prosody contribute to language learning, is
known as Phonological Bootstrapping
Hypothesis (Hoff, 2009).
• Children use phonological cues to break
into grammatical structure

• On page 10
 Cultural differences in the speech
addressed to children
• Although it is often claimed that the special
features of infant-directed speech are universal,
there are dissenting voices (Ingram, 1995; Ratner
&Pye, 1984).
• The fact that language acquisition is universal
whereas infant-directed speech may not be raises
the question of how important the properties of
infant-directed speech can be in explaining
language acquisition (Hoff, 2009).
 B. Phonological Development During the
Early Language Acquisition
• The appearance of a child’s first word is not a major
landmark in phonological development.
• Phonological development proceeds relatively
seamlessly through the transition from the pre-
linguistic to the linguistic period.
• During the first year of life, infants produce a variety of
vocalizations, beginning with simple cries at birth and
progressing through ordered sequence of stages to
complex babbling with identifiable syllables and adult-
like intonation patterns.
Two General Pre-Linguistic
Categories
• Stages of Prespeech Vocal Development
• 1. Reflexive Crying and Vegetative Sounds
sounds that accompany the biological
functions of breathing, sucking, and so on.

2. Cooing and laughter

At around 6 to 8 weeks of age, infants start
cooing. Babies produce their first laughter
around the age of 16 weeks.
• 3. Vocal Play
the period between 16 weeks and 30 weeks has
been called the period of vocal play (Stark,
1986), or the expansion stage (Oller, 1980).
In this stage, the variety of different consonant-
like and vowel-like sounds that infants produce
increases.
-growing repertoire and the combination of
different sounds
-squeals, growls, and a variety of “friction noises”
• 2-3 months
• -velars such as [g] and [k]
• 6-9 months of age
• -articulated in front of the mouth
• - [m], [n], [p], [b] and [d]

• Reduplicated Babbling
• 4. Reduplicated Babbling (sometime around 6 to 9
months of age)
• -the quality of infant’s vocalization changes, and
the infants start to babble.
• -Also known as canonical or reduplicated
babbling
• -presence of true syllables, and these syllables
produced in reduplicated series of the same
consonant and vowel combination such as [dada]
or [nanana].
• The appearance of canonical babbling is a major
landmark in the infant’s prespeech development
(Hoff, 2009).
• Canonical babbling is the first development that
distinguishes the vocal development of hearing
children from that of deaf children (Hoff, 2009).

• Nonreduplicated Babbling (variegated

babbling)
• The range of consonants and vowels infants
produce expands further.
• Infants combine different consonant + vowel
and consonant + vowel + consonant syllables
into series, unlike the repetitive series that
characterized the first canonical babbling.
Models of Phonological Development
• 1. Behaviorist model
• Reseracher attempted to account for children's
phonological development using the behaviorist
mechanisms of imitation and reinforcement
(Skinner, 1957; 1960).
• According to this model,babies produce sounds
they do because they imitate the sounds they hear
and because they receive positive reinforcement for
doing so.
• Overtime, the sounds babies produce come to
match the sounds of the target language because
these are the sounds that babies have imitated and
that have been reinforced.

• according to this proposal, a responsive

environment does seem to support vocal
development and also language development.
2. Biologically Based Theories
• Some researchers argue persuasively that the
biological factors underlying the human motor
capacity to produce speech shape both the course
of phonological development and its ultimate
result--namely the phonological properties of the
world's languages.
• According to J.L. Locke (J.L. Locke, 1983; J.L.
Locke & Pearson, 1992), infants' first sounds are
the sounds the human vocal apparatus is most
inclined to produce, given its anatomical and
physiological characteristics. sound production is
shaped by the development of motor capacity.
3. Cognitive Problem-Solving Approach
• A long-standing view of phonological development is
that children figure out the phonology of their
language as a solution to the problem of how to
sound like adults and to distinguish among the
words they know when others talk to them
(Ferguson & Farwell, 1975; Macken & Ferguson,
1983).
• This model of phonological development is
associated with the view that, initially, children's
word representations are whole-word
representations and only later, when a child's
capacity for mental representation is sufficient, are
words analyzed into their segmental components,
with contrasting features.
• Roman Jacobson in 1941 holds that children
represent the underlying structure of the sounds
of words from the very beginning of language.
4. The Connectionist Approach
• According to this model, children make
appropriations in learning sounds through
mapping rules orphonological processes.

• A central tenet of connectionism is a belief that

rules are not necessary to describe the
regularities of human behavior (Hoff, 2009).
Common Phonological Processes in Children's
Speech
• Whole-word processes
-weak syllable deletion: omission of an unstressed
syllable in the target word

on words like banana, butterfly

Reduplication: production of two identical syllables

based on one of the syllables in the target word
hello [jojo]
bottle [baba]
Consonant cluster reduction
cracker
• According to this model, children err because
their connections are not yet adult-like (Hoff,
2009).
Stages of Pre-Linguistic Development
• Stage 1 (Reflexive vocalizations- birth to two
months)
- This stage is characterized by a mojority of
reflexive vocalizations such as crying and fussing
and vegetative sounds, like coughing, bruping
and sneezing.
Stage 2 Cooing and Laughter
• During this stage, infants begin to make
comfort-state vocalizations called cooing or
going sounds.

• these vocalizations seem to be produced from

the back of the mouth, with velar consonants
and back vowels.
Stage 3 Vocal Play- four to six months
• During this stage, the variety of different
consonant-like and vowel-like sounds that
infants produce increases.
Stage 4 (Canonical Babbling- six months and
older)
• The prime feature of this period is the
appearance of sequences of consonant-vowel
syllabus with adult-like timing.

• The quality of infant's vocalizations changes, and

the infants start to babble.
Stage 5 (Jargon stage-10 months and
older)
• the last stage of babbling overlaps with the early
period of meaningful speech, and is
characterized by stringsof sounds and syllables
uttered with the rich variety of stress and
intonational patterns. this kind of output is
known by such names as conversational babble,
modulated babble, or jargon.