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Sound-meaning correspondences in babbling*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Joanna Blake  and
Robert Fink
Joanna Blake*
Affiliation:
York University
Robert Fink
Affiliation:
York University
*
Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele St, North York, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada.
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Abstract

The hypothesis that prelinguistic vocalizations contain extensive and systematic sound-meaning correspondences was examined through an exhaustive analysis of the babbling of five infants in their second year. These infants were videotaped over a period of three to six months at home and at a day-care centre. Their babbled utterances were transcribed phonetically and categorized according to consonant-type and vowel-type. Contexts for each utterance were also categorized, primarily according to the infant's simultaneous action. A quantitative analysis of co-occurrences between phonetic and contextual categories determined that across infants between 14 and 40% of utterances recurred in particular contexts with a greater than expected frequency. These findings support Halliday's (1975a) notion that babbling is not entirely random but contains consistent sound-meaning relations that are not adult-modelled. They also extend the notions of continuity between prelinguistic and linguistic stages of development to the semantic domain.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 229 - 253
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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Footnotes

*

A portion of these data was presented at the Biennial Conference on Child Development, University of Waterloo, on 9 May 1980. The research was supported in part by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada and from the Faculty of Arts of York University. The authors would like to acknowledge the painstaking work of Shirley Messer and Diane Massum in phonetically transcribing the tapes, as well as the assistance of Sheilah McConnell, Milan Tytla, Allen Walton, Elsa Chan, Wendy Austin and Georgia Quartaro at various stages of the project. We thank Professor Michael Friendly for his statistical advice. We are also indebted to the staff of the York University Day Care Center and to the parents of the participating infants for allowing our intrusions.

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