Deriving Speech from Nonspeech: A View from Ontogeny
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Peter F. MacNeilage
and Barbara L. Davis
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.
verified
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© 2000 S. Karger AG, Basel
Articles in the same Issue
- Special Section
- Title Page
- Foreword
- Acoustic Patterning of Speech Its Linguistic and Physiological Bases
- Investigating Unscripted Speech: Implications for Phonetics and Phonology
- Emotive Transforms
- The Source-Filter Frame of Prominence
- The C/D Model and Prosodic Control of Articulatory Behavior
- Diverse Acoustic Cues at Consonantal Landmarks
- Perceptual Processing
- Modeling and Perception of ‘Gesture Reduction’
- General Auditory Processes Contribute to Perceptual Accommodation of Coarticulation
- Adaptive Dispersion in Vowel Perception
- Language Acquisition as Complex Category Formation
- Biology of Communication and Motor Processes
- Singing Birds, Playing Cats, and Babbling Babies: Why Do They Do It?
- The Phonetic Potential of Nonhuman Vocal Tracts: Comparative Cineradiographic Observations of Vocalizing Animals
- Dynamic Simulation of Human Movement Using Large-Scale Models of the Body
- En Route to Adult Spoken Language / Language Development
- An Embodiment Perspective on the Acquisition of Speech Perception
- Speech to Infants as Hyperspeech: Knowledge-Driven Processes in Early Word Recognition
- The Construction of a First Phonology
- Auditory Constraints on Sound Structures
- Searching for an Auditory Description of Vowel Categories
- Commentary
- Imitation and the Emergence of Segments
- Deriving Speech from Nonspeech: A View from Ontogeny
- Paper
- Developmental Origins of Adult Phonology: The Interplay between Phonetic Emergents and the Evolutionary Adaptations of Sound Patterns
- Further Section
- Publications Björn Lindblom
- Index autorum Vol. 57, 2000
- Contents Vol. 57, 2000
Articles in the same Issue
- Special Section
- Title Page
- Foreword
- Acoustic Patterning of Speech Its Linguistic and Physiological Bases
- Investigating Unscripted Speech: Implications for Phonetics and Phonology
- Emotive Transforms
- The Source-Filter Frame of Prominence
- The C/D Model and Prosodic Control of Articulatory Behavior
- Diverse Acoustic Cues at Consonantal Landmarks
- Perceptual Processing
- Modeling and Perception of ‘Gesture Reduction’
- General Auditory Processes Contribute to Perceptual Accommodation of Coarticulation
- Adaptive Dispersion in Vowel Perception
- Language Acquisition as Complex Category Formation
- Biology of Communication and Motor Processes
- Singing Birds, Playing Cats, and Babbling Babies: Why Do They Do It?
- The Phonetic Potential of Nonhuman Vocal Tracts: Comparative Cineradiographic Observations of Vocalizing Animals
- Dynamic Simulation of Human Movement Using Large-Scale Models of the Body
- En Route to Adult Spoken Language / Language Development
- An Embodiment Perspective on the Acquisition of Speech Perception
- Speech to Infants as Hyperspeech: Knowledge-Driven Processes in Early Word Recognition
- The Construction of a First Phonology
- Auditory Constraints on Sound Structures
- Searching for an Auditory Description of Vowel Categories
- Commentary
- Imitation and the Emergence of Segments
- Deriving Speech from Nonspeech: A View from Ontogeny
- Paper
- Developmental Origins of Adult Phonology: The Interplay between Phonetic Emergents and the Evolutionary Adaptations of Sound Patterns
- Further Section
- Publications Björn Lindblom
- Index autorum Vol. 57, 2000
- Contents Vol. 57, 2000