A Comparative Study of the Speech Developments of Japanese and American English in Childhood (Part Three) : The Re-organization Process of Babbling Articulation Mechanisms

Abstract

We recorded the speech sounds of six Japanese and four American infants in Japan, and one American infant in the U.S.A., all of whom were about eight months to seventeen months old. We then compared the re-organization process of babbling articulation mechanisms of the three groups. From the age of about nine months, infants begin to use their simple meaningless sounds as a means of evocation and response to voice stimuli. Before that, they utter, not as a means of communication, but alone, playing with their articulatory organs at the level of babblings. We think they begin to re-organize their babbling articulation mechanisms at the level of language from about nine months of age. This is the first step of the re-organization process. From about ten months of age, they begin to imitate adults' voices actively. This is the second step of the re-organization process. In the third step they develop cognition of external voice stimuli. From about eleven or twelve months of age, they begin to use a few conventional words; this is the fourth step. At the beginning of the re-organization process, infants utter very simple meaningless sounds or repetitive babblings. When they begin to use words, they can not articulate correctly even bilabial plosives, which are articulated frequently at the babbling, especially at the repetitive babbling stage. They utter the words in various articulatory forms very actively and in various situations until about seventeen months. For example, they articulate /p/ in /papa/ not only [p] but also [b], [m], even [t], [k] etc., and they use /papa/ not only for their father but also for their mother, maid, other male adults etc. They end the re-organization process at about seventeen months of age and begin phonemicization and symbolization process after that. As for these basic tendencies of the re-organization process, we do not find significant differences among three groups.