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From babbling towards the sound systems of English and French: a longitudinal two-case study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Andrea G. Levitt  and
Jennifer G. Aydelott Utman
Andrea G. Levitt*
Affiliation:
Haskins Laboratories and Wellesley College
Jennifer G. Aydelott Utman
Affiliation:
Haskins Laboratories and Wellesley College
*
Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02181, USA.
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Abstract

The utterances of one French and one American infant at 0;5, 0;8, 0;11, and 1;2 were transcribed and acoustically analysed for syllable duration and vowel formant values. Both general and language-specific effects emerged in the longitudinal study. Initial similarities in the consonantal repertoires of both infants, increasing control in producing target F1 and F2 values, and developmental changes in babbling characteristics over time seem to reflect universal patterns. Yet the babbling of the infants differed in ways that appear to be due to differences in their language environments. Shifts in the infants' sound repertoires reflected phoneme frequencies in the adult languages. The English-learning infant produced more closed syllables, which is characteristic of English, than the French-learning infant. The French-learning infant tended to produce more regularly-timed nonfinal syllables and showed significantly more final-syllable lengthening (both characteristic of French) than the English-learning infant.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , February 1992 , pp. 19 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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Footnotes

*

The research reported here was supported by grant DC00403 to Haskins Laboratories. Recording of the French infant was begun when the first author was a NATO postdoctoral fellow at the CNRS in Paris, France. Analyses of the data were conducted by the second author as part of a senior honors thesis at Wellesley College. We thank the families of our American and our French infants for their co-operation. We are grateful to the Sloan Foundation and to Wellesley College for additional support for this project. Portions of this paper were presented at the April 1990 conference of the International Conference on Infant Studies in Montreal, Canada. Catherine Best, Alice F. Healy, Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Doug Whalen provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

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