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Deriving Speech from Nonspeech: A View from Ontogeny

  • Peter F. MacNeilage and Barbara L. Davis
Published/Copyright: August 22, 2000

Abstract

A comparison of babbling and early speech, word patterns of languages, and, in one instance, a protolanguage corpus, reveals three basic movement patterns: (1) a ‘Frame’ provided by the cycles of mandibular oscillation underlying the basic mouth close-open alternation of speech; this Frame appears in relatively ‘pure’ form in the tendency for labial consonants to co-occur with central vowels; (2) two other intracyclical consonant-vowel (CV) co-occurrence patterns sharing the alternation: coronal consonants with front vowels and dorsal consonants with back vowels; (3) an intercyclical tendency towards a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant (LC) sequence preference for word initiation. The first two patterns were derived from oral movement capabilities which predated speech. The Frame (1) may have evolved from ingestive cyclicities (e.g. chewing). The intracyclical consonant-vowel (CV) co-occurrence patterns involving tongue position constraints common to consonants and vowels (2) may result from the basic biomechanical property of inertia. The third pattern (LC) was a self-organizational result of pressures for interfacing cognition with action – a result which must have numerous analogs in other domains of movement organization.


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Published Online: 2000-08-22
Published in Print: 2000-12-01

© 2000 S. Karger AG, Basel

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Special Section
  2. Title Page
  3. Foreword
  4. Acoustic Patterning of Speech Its Linguistic and Physiological Bases
  5. Investigating Unscripted Speech: Implications for Phonetics and Phonology
  6. Emotive Transforms
  7. The Source-Filter Frame of Prominence
  8. The C/D Model and Prosodic Control of Articulatory Behavior
  9. Diverse Acoustic Cues at Consonantal Landmarks
  10. Perceptual Processing
  11. Modeling and Perception of ‘Gesture Reduction’
  12. General Auditory Processes Contribute to Perceptual Accommodation of Coarticulation
  13. Adaptive Dispersion in Vowel Perception
  14. Language Acquisition as Complex Category Formation
  15. Biology of Communication and Motor Processes
  16. Singing Birds, Playing Cats, and Babbling Babies: Why Do They Do It?
  17. The Phonetic Potential of Nonhuman Vocal Tracts: Comparative Cineradiographic Observations of Vocalizing Animals
  18. Dynamic Simulation of Human Movement Using Large-Scale Models of the Body
  19. En Route to Adult Spoken Language / Language Development
  20. An Embodiment Perspective on the Acquisition of Speech Perception
  21. Speech to Infants as Hyperspeech: Knowledge-Driven Processes in Early Word Recognition
  22. The Construction of a First Phonology
  23. Auditory Constraints on Sound Structures
  24. Searching for an Auditory Description of Vowel Categories
  25. Commentary
  26. Imitation and the Emergence of Segments
  27. Deriving Speech from Nonspeech: A View from Ontogeny
  28. Paper
  29. Developmental Origins of Adult Phonology: The Interplay between Phonetic Emergents and the Evolutionary Adaptations of Sound Patterns
  30. Further Section
  31. Publications Björn Lindblom
  32. Index autorum Vol. 57, 2000
  33. Contents Vol. 57, 2000
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