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Linguistic significance of babbling: evidence from a tracheostomized infant*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

John L. Locke  and
Dawn M. Pearson
John L. Locke*
Affiliation:
MGH Institute of Health Professions, Boston, Massachusetts and Harvard Medical School
Dawn M. Pearson
Affiliation:
MGH Institute of Health Professions and University of Massachusetts Medical School
*
Neurolinguistics Laboratory, MGH Institute of Health Professions, 15 River Street, Boston, MA 02108, USA.
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Abstract

The role of babbling in language development is not well understood. One source of evidence is the utterances of infants who were tracheostomized during the period in which they would normally have produced syllabic vocalization. We describe here the phonetic patterns and linguistic development of a girl called Jenny. She was tracheostomized and generally aphonic from 0;5–1;8 but cognitively and socially normal, with near-normal comprehension of language. Acoustic analyses of Jenny's utterances following decannulation revealed a tenth of the canonical syllables which might be expected in normally developing infants, an extremely small inventory of consonant-like segments, and a marked preference for labial obstruents. In these ways, she resembled a group of infants of the same age who also cannot hear their oral-motor movements, the congenitally deaf, suggesting that the audibility of babbling contributes to its onset. Two months following decannulation, when Jenny was 1;10, she produced only a handful of different words. We think this is because aphonia prevented her from discovering the referential value of vocal expression and discouraged the formation of a phonetic repertoire that could be appropriated for lexical service. This unusual case suggests that babbling normally facilitates the development of language and speech.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , February 1990 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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Footnotes

*

The authors are grateful to Jenny and her parents for their co-operation. We also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Jenny's physician, Joseph Hallett, and her speech-language pathologist, Susan Thompson. Members of our own research team, including Sarah Hamlin and especially Jeni Yamada, assisted in observing, testing, and recording; Corine Bickley helped with the acoustic analysis. We are indebted to Oiler and Eilers (1988) for permission to adapt their Fig. 2, and to Bruce Smith for editorial comments.

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