The Growth of Phonemic and Lexical Patterns in Infant Language

Abstract

This study is based on a record of my daughter Joan's speech from her eleventh to her thirty-sixth month.' It will deal chiefly with phonemic and lexical matters. For, apart from other reasons which will be discussed below, the morphological and syntactical development in the language of English-speaking children has been well described in numerous works, while only two authors have hitherto been concerned, implicitly or explicitly, with problems of phonemics in infant language,2 and as regards vocabulary patterns, it is impossible to glean any information from the customary alphabetical word lists.3 In a multitude of books on infant language it has been established that the acquisition of language properly speaking is preceded by a period, called 'babillage' (by H. Delacroix), 'Lallperiode' (by K. Bfihler), or babbling stage, during which the speech organs are developed and incessantly exercised. Even the most outlandish sounds, i.e. speech sounds which the child has certainly never heard, may be produced and perfectly articulated during this time. An American child may pronounce velar spirants, voiceless nasals, retroflex sibilants, etc. During the early stages a uvular r is quite common.4 Joan was particularly addicted (3d to 8th) to velar g-sounds and to voiceless palatal spirants.5 At the end of this stage, i.e. with the first appearance of phonemes, the ability to produce a multitude of speech sounds seems to vanish overnight. However,