A Comparative Study of the Speech Development of Japanese and American Children (Part Five) : Preparation for the Syntacticization Process

Abstract

We recorded the speech sounds of nine Japanese and three American infants in Japan and two American infants in the U.S.A., all of whom were between the ages of seven to twenty-two months. We then compared the developmental process of speech sounds until the beginning of the syntacticization process of the three groups. At about twelve months of age the infant begins to use a few words. During the first several months of the second year, he utters, in all sorts of situations, sounds of the words and meaningless sounds with various articulatory forms. Then he begins to utter two- or three-words-sentence-like sounds, i.e. sound chains consisting of two or three sound clusters, mostly including sounds of the words. He utters some of the words as if they were the cores of sound chains. From about the middle of the second year words and phonemes uttered by the infant increase in number. Most of the words he utters are those which grammatically could be classified as nouns. But there are in addition those which could be classified as pronouns, adjectives and adverbs. At first, of course, for him these words are not differentiated in grammatical function. Through the first several months of the phonemicization and symbolization process, he begins to notice some kind of dissimilarity between them and to use them differently. Then he begins to put two of them together and constructs two-words-sentences. We do not find significant differences among the three groups, except that the group of American infants in Japan shows slow developmental process just as other bilinguals do.