1. PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
Melissa Buco
Irish De Ocampo
Mariz Encarnacion
Ruth Espiritu

2. PRELINGUISTIC SPEECH
SOUND DEVELOPMENT

3. STAGES OF PRESPEECH VOCAL
DEVELOPMENT
0-2 months
(0-6 weeks)
Reflexive crying, vegetative sounds (coughs, sneezes), Sounds
reflecting their physical state.
2-5 months
(6-16 weeks)
Cooing and laughter. Early consonants develop, sounds from the
back of throat, laughs and giggles form (to the enjoyment of
parents).
4-6 months
(16-30 weeks)
Vocal play, babbling gets more adult-like, range and pitch
play,, bilabial trills are common (raspberries).
6-12 months Reduplicated babbling ex: mamama, pitch control develops, ability
to sound out some consonants and vowels.
9-18 months Non-reduplicative babbling, varying of consonants and vowels.

4. • Reflexive crying and Vegetative
sounds
– In crying and in making these
vegetative sounds, an infant’s
vocal cords vibrate, and the
airflow through the vocal
apparatus is stopped and started.
Thus, even these unpromising
sounds include features that will
later be used to produce speech
sounds

5. • Cooing and laughter
– Coos- sounds that babies make
when they appear to be happy
and contented
– Social interaction- elicit cooing
– 1st laughter- around the age of
16 weeks

6. • Vocal play
– Also known as the Expansion Stage
(Oller, 1980)
– During this stage, the variety of
different consonant-like and
vowel-like sounds that infants
produce increases.
– Marginal babbling- long series of
sounds that infants produce by the
end of this expansion stage

7. – Other noises include: squeals,
growls, friction noises
– 1st recognizable consonant-like
sounds- heard at around 2 to 3
months, and are usually the velars
– Around 6 months- infants start to
produce consonant-like sounds
articulated in the front of the
mouth (bilabials and alveolars)

8. • Reduplicated babbling
– Also known as Canonical Babbling,
is distinguished from the
vocalizations that precede it by the
presence of true syllables, and these
syllables are typically produced in
reduplicated series of the same
consonant and vowel combination.
– The appearance of canonical
babbling is a major landmark in the
infant’s prespeech development. It is
the first development that
distinguishes the vocal development
of hearing children from that of deaf
children.

9. • Nonreduplicated babbling
– Also known as Variegated Babbling
– The range of consonants and vowels
infants produce expands further.
– Infants combine different consonant +
vowel and consonant + vowel +
consonant syllables into series.
– Prosody- the intonation contour of
speech
– Jargon- wordless sentences

10. – Intonation babies- children who
produce a great deal of jargon and
who do so for a long time
(Dore, 1975)
– Word babies- children who
produce relatively little jargon and
who move quickly on to learning
the words to the tune
(Dore, 1975)

11. INFLUENCE OF THE TARGET LANGUAGE
ON BABBLING
– Universal- even the particular sounds
that babies produce are similar
across environments
– Babbling drift- as early as 6
months, the sounds that babies
produce are somewhat influenced by
the language that they hear (R.
Brown, 1958)

12. – 2 techniques:
1) To use the judgments of
competent speakers to determine
whether they can tell the differences
among the babblings of babies who
are acquiring different languages.
2) To record babblings of children
who are acquiring different
languages and analyze them for the
presence and frequency of features
in the respective adult languages

13. • De Boysson-Bardies, Sagart,
and Durand (1984)- 1st
technique

14. • De Boysson-Bardies, Sagart,
and Durand (1984)- 2nd
technique

15. – By the end of the babbling stage,
children have made great progress
from their first vowels to an
increasingly large repertoire of
consonants and then to knowing
something about the prosody and
sound patterns of their target
language.
– Children’s vocalizations at this point
are most frequently single syllables,
with some two-syllable
productions.

16. THE TRANSITION FROM BABBLING TO
WORDS
BABBLING FIRST WORD
TRANSITIONAL PERIOD
Children produce their own invented words.
These invented words are soaund sequences
children use with consistent meanings but
that bear no discernible resemblance to the
sound of any word in the target language.

17. • Transitional forms
– Protowords
– Sensorimotor morphemes
– Quasiwords
– Phonetically consistent forms
– Often express broad meanings, and
their use tends either to be tightly
bound to particular contexts or to
serve particular functions.
– Stage of vocal development overlaps
with the use of communicative
gestures

18. PROCESSES UNDERLYING INFANTS’
DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH SOUNDS
• Nervous system maturation

19. • Experience
1) Hearing the speech adults
produce
2) Infants’ experience hearing their
own vocal output

20. TRIVIA
• A baby’s first form of communication
is:
CRYING SMILING

21. TRIVIA
• To be “bulol” in early years is normal.
– True
– False

22. TRIVIA
• Children stop babbling when they
learn to speak words.
– True
– False

23. PRELINGUISTIC
SPEECH PERCEPTION

24. Do babies learn the ability to
discriminate speech sounds during the
process of learning a language, or are
they already equipped with that
ability?

25. How are perceptual abilities
important to language learning?

26. Are babies deaf when they are born?

27. How can we study the perceptual
abilities of infants?

28. Are babies able to discriminate the
sounds that they hear?

29. How extensive is an infant’s ability to
distinguish phoneme and non-
phoneme sounds?

30. Is the perceptual ability of humans
a species-specific ability?

31. PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
ONCE SPEECH BEGINS

32. Word Learning
• Very young children fail to
distinguish newly taught words
that differ only by one segment
• Multiple demands of the word-
learning task do not leave the
child with sufficient resources to
register all the phonetic details of
newly encountered words

33. Word Recognition
• It is usually believed that children
only have rough representations;
they are less sensitive to differences
between words at the level phonetic
segments and base their judgments
on syllables or whole words.
• However, more recent evidence
suggests that children do represent
words they know in some phonetic
detail, such as when they show
sensitivity to small
mispronunciations.

34. Word Production
First Words
• simple syllable structure: either
single syllables or reduplicated
syllables
ex. mama, dada
• small inventory of vowels and
consonants

35. • sounds most common in children’s
babble were also most common in
early vocabularies
• some sounds in the adult
language were noticeably absent
in children’s productions
/m/, /b/,/d/- present
/ð/,/Ѳ/,/r/,/l/- absent

36. • It has been proposed that early word
representations are of the whole,
rather than as separate phonemic
segments
-lack of consistency in the ways
children produce sounds during
this stage
-phonemic idioms- words the
child produces in a very adultlike
way, while still incorrectly
producing other words that use
the very same sounds

37. The Development of Phonological
Processes
• at around 18 months of age,
children’s productions become more
consistent, though not adultlike
• phonological processes- develop
systematic ways in which they alter
the sounds of the target language so
that they fit within the range of
sounds they can produce

38. • whole word
Reduplication
• individual segments
Assimilation
ex. “doggy” /dɑgi/ “goggy” /gɑgi/
“self” /sɛlf/  “felf” /fɛlf/
Denasalization
ex. “jam” /dʒæm/  “jab” /dʒæb/
“sing” /sɪŋ/  “sig” /sɪg/
Gliding
ex. “look” /lʊk/  “wook” /wʊk/

39. Reduction (consonant clusters)
ex. “school” /skul/  “kool” /kul/
“bring” /brɪŋ/  “bing” /bɪŋ/
Deletion
ex. “boot” /but/  “boo” /bu/
“away” /əwej/  “way” /wej/
“butterfly” /bʌtərflaj/  “bufly” /bʌflaj/
Multiple processes
ex. “giraffe” /dʒəræf/  “faffe” /fæf/
/dʒəræf/  /ræf/
/ræf/  /fæf/

40. • strategies:
-avoid acquiring new words that
use sounds that they can’t
produce
-assimilate a new word either to
another similar-sounding word
or to a pre-existing sound-
pattern (ex. VC,CV, CVC, CVCV)

41. • the need for these processes decline
gradually declines as children
become able to produce more and
more of the sounds of the target
language

42. The Relation Between Perception and
Production
• children demonstrate awareness
of the difference between their
own pronunciation of a word and
the adult pronunciation
• ‘fis’ phenomenon

43. Child: “Gimme my guk!”
Father: “You mean your
duck?”
Child: “Yes, my guk!”
Father (hands child the duck):
“Okay, here’s your guk.”
Child (annoyed): “No, Daddy -
I say it that way, not you.”

44. • children’s mispronunciations do
not necessarily imply that children
have incomplete mental
representations of how the word is
supposed to sound

45. Cross-Linguistic Differences in
Phonological Development
• the order in which sounds appear in
children’s speech is influenced by
properties of the target language
-ex. /v/ is a relatively late-
appearing sound for children
acquiring English, but not for
those acquiring Swedish,
Bulgarian, and Estonian

46. • the function different speech sounds
serve in the language is another
important factor
• it is not the frequency with which
children hear the sound but rather
the frequency with which the sound
is used in different words
-ex. the and this (/ð/)

48. Individual Differences in Phonological
Development
• difference in rate of development
• difference in the particular sounds
produced
• difference in the approaches children
take to constructing a phonological
system

49. The Development of Phonological
Awareness
• phonological awareness- being able
to rhyme, count syllables, and think of
different words that being with a
particular sound
• children show some signs of
phonological awareness beginning
around 2 years old
• central importance in considering the
relation between oral language and
literacy
-children’s levels of phonological
awareness predict their success
in learning to read

50. THE RELATION BETWEEN
PHONOLOGICAL AND LEXICAL
DEVELOPMENT

51. Issue: Does children’s knowledge of the sounds of
their language influence their acquisition of
words and does their knowledge of words
influence their knowledge of sounds?

52. Evidences

53. 1. Lexical selection

54. • items in the child's vocabulary are
fit to the repertoire of the sounds
they can produce
-i.e. mama, papa (mother/
father)
- child's phonetic inventory
directly proportional to size of
vocabulary

55. 2. Lexical development causes drives
phonological development

56. • From vague and global
representations, word
representations achieve full
phonological detail once vocabularies
acquire it

57. • the denser the neighborhood, the
more distinct the sounds become
to the child

58. • Definition of “neighborhood”

59. Explanations of Phonological
Development

60. A. Behaviorist

62. Problems

63. 1. not consider maturation process
2. non-selection of sound reinforcement
from parents
3. acquisition of mental representations
that are not unconscious

64. B. Rule and constraint based approach

65. - driving force of phonological
development is not rules but constraints
- Phonological development consists of
learning the ranking of
-constraints that applies in the language
one is acquiring

66. C. Biologically based theories

67. - the initial sounds made are
dependent on what the human vocal
apparatus is inclined to make
- explains the similarities of the first
sounds babies make at a certain age

68. Universality of Sounds

69. D. Usage based Phonology

70. - language input and use of the
language

71. E. Cognitive Problem Solving Approach

72. - word representation is seen as a
whole, and only after sufficient mental
representations, word analysis
becomes segmental with contrasting
features

73. F. Connectionist Approach

74. - children try to approximate the target
word and commits errors because of
immature connections in the brain

75. / Ѳɛnk ju/!!!