Pre-speech Development

## Stages of Development

* Agreement about the general nature of theses stages and their order of succession, ways of discriminating the onset of each have not yet been clearly specified. The onset of sertain stages usch as cooing and laughter, and reduplicated babbling, appeared to be more clearly marked than the onset of others, such as vocal play and single-word production. Behaviours typical of any given stage may have precursors in a previous stage and may continue into the following one. For example, the cry and vegetative sounds typical of Stage 1 are still found frequently in Stage 2, as well as the new behaviours of cooing and laughing. In such a case, time-series analyses in which frequency of occurece of a given sound tape is charted over time, may provide the most useful means of defining stage onset. (Yeni-Komshian 1980:75)

## Unknown

* The 1st stage of Child Language begins with a clear distinction a delineation of consonant and vowel. (\*say what?) (Jackobson 1968: 69)

## Reflexive, Vegetative sounds

* 0 – 6 weeks – Reflexive vocalizations: these vocalizations comprise cry and fussing (discomfort) sounds, and vegetative sounds including some of a primitive variety that are found in very young infants but subsequently disappear (\*because of how they breathe? Because they’ve gotten used to the outside world? In simple terms, what are the sounds that disappear and why are they primitive?) (Yeni-Komshian, 1980:74)

### Vegetative sounds Edit

* M: In crying and making vegetative sounds, the vocal cords vibrate and the airflow through the vocal apparatus is stopped and started. Thus, even these unpromising sounds include some features that will later be used to produce speech sounds (Hoff, 2013:116)

## Cooing

### Timing

* 6-8 weeks (laughter around 16 weeks) (Hoff, 2013)
* 6- 16 weeks (Yeni-Komshian 1980:74)

## Description Edit

* Happy, contented baby sounds (Hoff, 2013)
* First coos: one long #vowel (Hoff, 2013)
* First produced in pleasurable interaction but may be subsequently elicited in situations that do not involve interaction (\*but doesn’t ‘elicit’ imply interaction?). At the time of onset of cooing, the presence of a smiling, nodding face would appear to be a powerful, if not necessary, eliciting stimulus (Yeni-Komshian 1980:74)
	+ Social thing (Hoff, 2013)
* Increased control over voicing and the vocal tract reflects an integration of previous vocalization types in a first structure allowing a consonant – vowel like configuration of the “coo”. (Lust, 2006:152)
	+ These vocalization types are a vocalic mechanism in crying and a consonantal mechanism in vegetative sounds
* Cooing and gooing, where basic syllable shapes (V, CV) and velar-like #closants are identified during the ages of two to four months (Robb et al., 1994)
* Continue producing cooing noises for many more months, and the quality changes with age (Hoff, 2013)
	+ one change is the variety of different vowel-like sounds  (\*what determines quality in a coo?)
	+ instead of one sound, a series of different #vowel-like sounds strung together but separated by intakes of breath.
* Cooing: infant starts and stops #phonotation within a single breath unit, moving beyond #vegetative + #reflective sounds (Oller, 1981; See also, Koopmans-van Beinum and Van der Stelt 1998:122) (Lust, 2006:152)
* More #features of speech sounds are present in these vocalizations than there were in earlier ones (\*specifically which earlier vocalizations? coos? vegetative sounds?) (Hoff, 2013)
* #Babbling period is introduced in the child by so called cooing period: the tongue maintains approximately its normal position and indeterminate neutral sounds are produced (Jackobson 1968: 68)
	+ Neither vowels nor consonants = both at the same time

## Vocal Play

### Timing

16-30 weeks (Hoff, 2013)

6 – 30 weeks (Yeni-Komshian et al., 1980)

### Description

* The variety of different #consonant-like and #vowel-like sounds increases. (Hoff, 2013)
* They seem to gain increasing control over the production of their growing repertoires of sounds, and they combine their different sounds into increasingly long and complex series. (Hoff, 2013)

* “expansion stage” (Oller, 1977), “Exploratory mapping stage” (Zlatin, 1975, Mattingly, 1973). Playful use of behaviours such as squealing, growling, yelling loudly, production of noises by blowing air, food, saliva through a constriction in the mouth or pharynx, and nasal murmurs (Yeni-Komshian 1980:74)
* Friction noises (Hoff, 2013)

* Terminates in “marginal babbling” (Oller, 1977), a mixed vocal play

## Marginal Babbling

M: Vocal play terminates in “marginal babbling” (Oller, 1977), a mixed vocal play (Yeni-Komshian et al., 1980). The long series of sounds produced by the end of this expansion stage: #marginal babbling (Hoff, 2013)

* Long series of segments are found in which consonantal and vocalic elements both occur but they do not resemble syllables of adult speech in their durational aspects or other articulatory features (\*so these elements sound (and ‘act’) like consonants and vowels but aren’t?)
	+ Consonantal and vocalic elements that were prominent earlier are combined with each other in novel ways