The Nature and Origins of Ambient Language Influence on Infant Vocal Production and Early Words
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Marilyn May Vihman
Abstract
Phonological structure may be seen as emerging in ontogeny from the combined effects of performance constraints rooted in the neuromotor and perceptual systems, individual lexical development and the influence of the particular ambient language. We review here the nature and origins of the earliest ambient language influences. Global effects within the first year of life include both (1) loss of early appearing phonetic gestures not supported by the ambient language and (2) positive effects, reflecting infant attention to prosody and to cues available in the visual as well as the auditory modality. In the course of early lexical development more specific effects become manifest as individual children pursue less common phonetic paths to which the ambient language provides ‘sufficient exposure’.
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© 1994 S. Karger AG, Basel
Articles in the same Issue
- Special Section
- Contents, Vol. 51, No.1-3, 1991
- Paper
- Editors’ Introduction
- ‘Speaker’ and ‘Speech’ Characteristics: A Deductive Approach
- From EMG to Formant Patterns of Vowels: The Implication of Vowel Spaces
- Individual Variation in Measures of Voice
- Glottal Stops and Glottalization in German
- Tongue Body Kinematics in Velar Stop Production: Influences of Consonant Voicing and Vowel Context
- What’s in a Schwa?
- Durational Correlates of Quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-Language Evidence for a Theory of Adaptive Dispersion
- Evidence for the Adaptive Nature of Speech on the Phrase Level and Below
- Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation
- Listeners’ Normalization of Vowel Quality Is Influenced by ‘Restored’ Consonantal Context
- The Phonological Reality of Locus Equations across Manner Class Distinctions: Preliminary Observations
- Musical Significance of Musicians’ Syllable Choice in Improvised Nonsense Text Singing: A Preliminary Study
- Cross-Language Differences in Phonological Acquisition: Swedish and American /t/
- The Nature and Origins of Ambient Language Influence on Infant Vocal Production and Early Words
- Conventional, Biological and Environmental Factors in Speech Communication: A Modulation Theory
- Prolegomena to a Theory of the Sound Pattern of the First Spoken Language
Articles in the same Issue
- Special Section
- Contents, Vol. 51, No.1-3, 1991
- Paper
- Editors’ Introduction
- ‘Speaker’ and ‘Speech’ Characteristics: A Deductive Approach
- From EMG to Formant Patterns of Vowels: The Implication of Vowel Spaces
- Individual Variation in Measures of Voice
- Glottal Stops and Glottalization in German
- Tongue Body Kinematics in Velar Stop Production: Influences of Consonant Voicing and Vowel Context
- What’s in a Schwa?
- Durational Correlates of Quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-Language Evidence for a Theory of Adaptive Dispersion
- Evidence for the Adaptive Nature of Speech on the Phrase Level and Below
- Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation
- Listeners’ Normalization of Vowel Quality Is Influenced by ‘Restored’ Consonantal Context
- The Phonological Reality of Locus Equations across Manner Class Distinctions: Preliminary Observations
- Musical Significance of Musicians’ Syllable Choice in Improvised Nonsense Text Singing: A Preliminary Study
- Cross-Language Differences in Phonological Acquisition: Swedish and American /t/
- The Nature and Origins of Ambient Language Influence on Infant Vocal Production and Early Words
- Conventional, Biological and Environmental Factors in Speech Communication: A Modulation Theory
- Prolegomena to a Theory of the Sound Pattern of the First Spoken Language
