Discernible differences in the babbling of infants according to target language
- 1 February 1984
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Journal of Child Language
- Vol. 11 (1) , 1-15
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900005559
Abstract
Samples of babbling productions of 6-, 8- and 10-month-old infants from different language backgrounds were presented to adult judges whose task was to identify the infants from their own linguistic community. The results show that certain language-specific metaphonological cues render this identification possible when the samples exhibit long and coherent intonation patterns. The segmental indications that are present in the fully syllabic productions of canonical babbling do not allow the judges to identify the infants correctly from their own linguistic community. These results seem to support the hypothesis of an early influence on babbling of the metaphonological characteristics of the target language.Keywords
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