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Tendances générales et influence de la langue maternelle : les consonnes terminales dans le babillage et les premiers mots
Abstract
Résumé
On présente dans cet article une étude interculturelle des consonnes finales produites par les enfants de quatre pays différents durant la période de transition entre le babillage et l'acquisition des cinquante premiers mots. Les analyses confirment une tendance générale à produire des syllabes ouvertes en position finale, mais montrent aussi que les caractéristiques structurelles des langues maternelles influent sur la fréquence d'occurrence et le type des consonnes finales.
Mots clés : développement de la parole, environnement linguistique, consonnes terminales.
... Several studies have provided persuasive evidence of ambient language influence on prelinguistic vocalizations and early words. Such effects have been demonstrated for infant use of vowel space at 10 months (de Boysson-Bardies, Halle, Sagart, & Durand, 1989), for syllabic organization at about 1 year (de Boysson- Bardies, 1993), and for consonantal place and manner, vocalization length, and final consonant production over the period of about 9 to 18 months (de Boysson-Bardies & Durand, 1991;de Boysson-Bardies et al., 1992). Early intonational effects have also been reported (over the period of 6-13 months: Whalen, Levitt, & Wang, 1991; by about 18 months: Engstrand, Williams, & Stromquist, 1991;Halle, de Boysson-Bardies, & Vihman, 1991 For their assistance in the collection, transcription, and analysis of the Swedish children's data, we thank Liselotte Roug-Hellichius and Ingrid Landberg, and for his advice and support, we thank Francisco Lacerda (all of Stockholm University). ...
... This study addressed the following questions. 1. Representativeness of the sample: Does the sample of target words used in de Boysson- Bardies and Durand (1991), de Boysson- , and de Boysson- Bardies et al. (1992) constitute a representative sample of the adult language for the purpose of investigating ambient language effects? In particular, how similar is the phonetic profile derived from the target words to profiles taken directly from maternal speech? ...
Wide individual differences in early word production characterize children learning the same language, but the role of specific adult input in this interchild variability is unknown. Sampling the speech of American, French, and Swedish mothers (5 in each language group) to their 1-year-old children, this study analyzed the distribution of consonantal categories, word length, and final consonants in running speech, content words, initial consonant of content words, and target words (adult models of words attempted by the children) as well as the children's own early words (from age 9 months to about 18 months). Variability is greater in child words than adult speech, and individual mother–child dyads show no evidence of specific maternal influence on the phonetics of the child's speech.
... The different contrasts were maximized by the exclusive utilization of liquids as the second consonant of the onset clusters and as the coda. The choice of the vowels, and the relationships between consonants and vowels, were designed to be consistent with speech motor theory and with data for the French language (see Boysson-Bardies, 1994; Boysson-Bardies & Durand, 1991; Boysson-Bardies & Vihman, 1991; Davis & MacNeilage, 1990). We used three vowels, two high with one front (i) and one central (u, /y/), and one back central (o). ...
The central hypothesis of this study was that phonological mediation plays a critical role in the early development of reading and spelling in French. Therefore, the phonological structure of items, as opposed to their visual characteristics, was expected to be a significant determinant of performance. This hypothesis was tested in a short-term longitudinal study with a group of first graders (N = 57) who were administered a reading and a spelling task involving pseudowords of different syllabic structures. The first prediction was that there would be better performance on pseudowords with a simple structure (CVCVCV) than on pseudowords with a complex structure (CCVCVC or CVCCVC), and that errors on syllables with a complex structure would involve the deletion of codas or the simplification of complex onsets. We also predicted that errors would be consistent with a sonority hierarchy; for example, we expected more deletions of liquids than obstruents in clusters.
La compétence phonétique est négligée dans l'enseignement des langues étrangères en général et dans l'enseignement du français langue étrangère en particulier par rapport aux autres compétences. Pourtant, apprendre correctement la prononciation d'une langue est indispensable pour la compétence de communication. Lorsque l’on examine les manuels de français langue étrangère, on constate qu'on accorde peu ou pas de place à l'enseignement et aux exercices de phonétique. De plus, les recherches dans le domaine montrent que la plupart des enseignants de français n'ont pas reçu une formation suffisante sur la phonétique du français et ils considèrent leurs formations sur ce sujet insuffisantes. Cette étude descriptive vise à évaluer les compétences phonétiques en français des étudiants du département de la didactique du FLE à l’Université Anadolu. À ce propos, les données ont été collectées auprès des participants en utilisant la technique de la lecture oralisée et de la dictée. Ces données ont été examinées à l'aide d'une méthode d'analyse d’erreurs, et les sources des erreurs identifiées ont été classées et présentées sous deux titres : les erreurs liées aux habiletés phonétiques réceptives et les erreurs liées aux habiletés phonétiques productives. L'analyse des données révèle que les étudiants ont commis des erreurs principalement au niveau segmental. Les erreurs les plus courantes et évidentes commises par les étudiants turcs lors de la prononciation du français sont ; les liaisons, les erreurs d’articulation des sons en fin de mot et l’emploi incorrect des phonèmes inexistants en turc tels que les voyelles nasales et le /E muet/. Il est possible de déduire que ces erreurs proviennent de la différence entre les formes orale et écrite du français et de l'influence de la langue maternelle (turc). Pour remédier à ces erreurs phonétiques commises par les étudiants turcs lors de l'apprentissage du français, cette étude propose notamment l'inclusion de la formation phonétique dans la formation initiale et continue des enseignants et l'utilisation des nouvelles technologies multimédias et des méthodes efficaces pour améliorer les compétences phonétiques des étudiants.
Temporal and rythmic impairment of speech production in children with dysphaxia
The purpose of this study is to analyze temporal and rhythmic organization of spontaneous speech elicited in a play situation and a narrative task in ten children with developmental dysphasia diagnosed at age 4 and followed to age 8. The main issue is to explore the nature of the phonological syntactic deficit in these children. Results show that children with developmental dysphasia show evidence of persistent rhythmic speech disturbances at age 8 occurring by an effortful control in the programmation of speech given phonological constraints (French accentual structure) and intonosyntax constraints (segmentation into prosodic constituents and accurate mapping between prosody and syntax. Such impairments co-occur with severe auditory short-term deficit
EnglishThe purpose of this study is to analyze temporal and rhythmic organization of spontaneous speech elicited in a play situation and a narrative task in ten children with developmental dysphasia diagnosed at age 4 and followed to age 8. The main issue is to explore the nature of the phonological syntactic deficit in these children. Results show that children with developmental dysphasia show evidence of persistent rhythmic speech disturbances at age 8 occurring by an effortful control in the programmation of speech given phonological constraints (French accentual structure) and intonosyntax constraints (segmentation into prosodic constituents and accurate mapping between prosody and syntax. Such impairments co-occur with severe auditory short-term deficit francaisL'objectif de cette etude est d'analyser l'organisation temporelle et rythmique de la parole spontanee elicitee dans une situation de jeu et dans un contexte de livre d'images chez dix enfants dysphasiques diagnostiques a 4 ans et suivis a intervalles reguliers jusqu'a 8 ans. Il s'agit d'explorer la nature de leur deficit phonologique syntaxique. Les resultats montrent que les enfants manifestent tous a 8 ans, a des degres divers, des desequilibres rythmiques de la parole qui se traduisent par un effort important dans le controle et la programmation de la parole, compte tenu des contraintes phonologiques (structure accentuelle du francais) et des contraintes d'appariement intonosyntaxique (segmentation en constituants prosodiques et actualisation d'un principe de congruence entre la prosodie et la syntaxe). Ces perturbations coexistent avec des deficits importants en memoire auditive
Differences among languages offer a way of studying the process of infant adaptation from broad initial capacities to language-specific phonetic production. We designed analyses of the distribution of consonantal place and manner categories in French, English, Japanese, and Swedish to determine (1) whether systematic differences can be found in the babbling and first words of infants from different language backgrounds, and, if so, (2) whether these differences are related to the phonetic structure of the language spoken in the environment. Five infants from each linguistic environment were recorded under similar conditions from babbling only to the production of 25 words in a session. Although all of the infants generally made greater use of labials, dentals, and stops than of other classes of sounds, a clear phonetic selection could already be discerned in babbling, leading to statistically significant differences among the groups. This selection can be seen to arise from phonetic patterns of the ambient language. Comparison of the babbling and infant word repertoires reveals differences reflecting the motoric consequences of sequencing constraints.
The ultimate task of phonology is to discover the causes of the behavior of speech sounds. To do this phonologists must refer to the way speech is created and used by humans, including how it is stored in the brain, retrieved, executed, perceived, and used to facilitate social interaction among humans. The domain of phonology is therefore mind, matter, and manners. This chapter is about matter: some aerodynamic and anatomical properties of the vocal tract and how they influence the shape and patterning of speech sounds. A secondary aim of this chapter is to show not only that the study of the physical aspects of speech assists phonology but also that phonology can return the favor: A careful, perhaps inspired, analysis of sound patterns in language can help us to discover and understand some of the complexities of speech production (Ohala, 1975a, 1975b, 1978a, 1978b, 1980, 1981; Ohala & Riordan, 1979; Shattuck-Hufnagel, Chapter 6, this volume; MacKay, 1972).
Includes comments by Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This article reports three studies designed to increase our understanding of developmental changes in cross-language speech perception. In the first study, we compared adult speakers of English and Hindi on their ability to discriminate pairings from a synthetic voiced, unaspirated place-of-articulation continuum. Results indicated that English listeners discriminate two categories (ba vs. da), whereas Hindi listeners discriminate three (ba vs. da, and da vs. DA). We then used stimuli from within this continuum in the next two experiments to determine (a) if our previously reported finding (Werker & Tees, 1984a) of a reorganization between 6 and 12 months of life from "universal" to "language-specific" phonetic perception would be evident using synthetic (rather than natural) stimuli in which the physical variability within and between categories could be controlled, and (b) whether the younger infants' sensitivity to nonnative speech contrasts is best explained by reference to the phonetic relevance or the physical similarity of the stimuli. In addition to replicating the developmental reorganization, the results indicate that infant speech perception is phonetically relevant. We discuss the implications of these results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Taking as a point of departure Locke's biological model for the origins of phonological development, this study encompasses analyses of phonetic tendencies, consonant use in babbling and early words, and phonological word-selection patterns. Data from 10 children aged 9 to 16 months are drawn from four lexically defined points covering the period from no word use to a cumulative vocabulary of 50 words. Individual differences are found to prevail from the start in all three domains analyzed, with some increase in uniformity across subjects with increasing knowledge of language. Furthermore, the phonological processes typical of development from age 1 to 3 or 4 years are found to be rooted in the phonetic tendencies of the prelinguistic period.
A cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in babbling was carried out. 1047 vowels produced by twenty 10-month-old infants from Parisian French, London English, Hong Kong Cantonese and Algiers Arabic language backgrounds were recorded in the cities of origin and spectrally analysed. F1-F2 plots of these vowels were obtained for each subject and each language group. Statistical analyses provide evidence of differences between infants across language backgrounds. These differences parallel those found in adult speech in the corresponding languages. Implications of an early build-up of target-language-oriented production skills are discussed.
The aim of the first edition of Language Acquisition was to provide as comprehensive a description and explanation as possible of the changes in the child's language as he or she grows older. In this second edition Paul Fletcher and Michael Garman have the same fundamental aim. Six years later the field has not changed dramatically, but there have been fruitful theoretical developments - the learnability hypothesis, in particular, has been influentially expounded - and empirical work seeking evidence of specific language capacities in children has made notable advances. Equally significant are shifts in emphasis: the growing interest in cross-linguistic studies, for example, or accounts of language development of reading and writing. All these changes are reflected in the second edition. About half the chapters are entirely new, having been specially commissioned for this edition. The remainder of the book consists of substantially revised versions of chapters from the first edition. Like its predecessor, this collection is the work of distinguished specialists from many countries and will provide an invaluable resource for students and professionals alike who have an interest in the field of child language acquisition.
it is suggested that the initial stages of reduplicative canonical babbling in infants can be characterized as primarily involving production of Pure Frames, in that control signals specific to single segments within the successive syllablelike babbling envelopes are virtually absent (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Includes comments by Michael Studdert-Kennedy, Edith M. Maxwell and Corine Bickley. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
put forth a model of the way in which infant [4 day–12 mo olds] speech-perception capacities may develop into a system that underlies word recognition in fluent speech / although the WRAPSA [Word Recognition and Phonetic Structure Acquisition] model focuses on the way that word-recognition processes develop during infancy, it also attempts to deal with a number of issues relating to the infant's knowledge of the sound structure of the native language
focuses on the representation of sound patterns in the mental lexicon and how they change as the child gains knowledge of his or her native language / identified a number of functions involved in the development of the mental lexicon, including discrimination, categorization, segmentation, attention, and representation and memory / review what is known about the nature of these functions during infancy, particularly as they relate to speech processing / consider which aspects of the stream of speech are likely to be extracted and why, how those sounds are perceived and encoded, and what sorts of linguistic units are stored in memory / conclude with a discussion of a possible model of the way that the mental lexicon develops (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Previous scholars have claimed that the child's babbling (meaningless speech-like vocalizations) includes a random assortment of the speech sounds found in the languages of the world. Babbled sounds have been claimed to bear no relationship to the sounds of the child's later meaningful speech. The present research disputes the traditional position on babbling by showing that the phonetic content of babbled utterances exhibits many of the same preferences for certain kinds of phonetic elements and sequences that have been found in the production of meaningful speech by children in later stages of language development.
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Data are presented that chart one child's acquisition of Mexican-Spanish consonants during the period from 1;7 (when only twelve words were produced) to 2;1 years of age (when over 150 words were used). Towards the goal of specifying the basic units of acquisition, three possible units are considered, the ‘word’, the ‘phoneme’ and the ‘feature’. The main proposition of this paper is that an analysis that recognizes ‘word patterns’ and the prosodic treatment of words (1) describes the dvelopment of the consonant structure of words, (2) accounts for several unusual segmental correspondence and, in addition, (3) captures significant facts about frequency of word types and phonemes-in-certain-positions better than an analysis that assumes the phoneme to be the basic organizational unit of the child's early development. In the later stages, however, the phoneme appears to replace the word as the basic structural unit. The evidence regarding the role of the feature is equivocal. Data from this child show more variation and a less systematic progression of stages than is sometimes reported for children. Thus, these data are also evaluated in relation to reported ‘universals’ of acquisition, and the issue of individual differences is discussed.
Previous work in which we compared English infants, English adults, and Hindi adults on their ability to discriminate two pairs of Hindi (non-English) speech contrasts has indicated that infants discriminate speech sounds according to phonetic category without prior specific language experience (Werker, Gilbert, Humphrey, & Tees, 1981), whereas adults and children as young as age 4 (Werker & Tees, in press), may lose this ability as a function of age and or linguistic experience. The present work was designed to (a) determine the generalizability of such a decline by comparing adult English, adult Salish, and English infant subjects on their perception of a new non-English (Salish) speech contrast, and (b) delineate the time course of the developmental decline in this ability. The results of these experiments replicate our original findings by showing that infants can discriminate non-native speech contrasts without relevant experience, and that there is a decline in this ability during ontogeny. Furthermore, data from both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies shows that this decline occurs within the first year of life, and that it is a function of specific language experience.
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The phoneme identification process of an automatic speech recognition system may be aided through the use of statistics of phoneme occurrence in conversational English. These statistics are also applicable to the fields of linguistics and speech, to teaching English as a foreign language and to speech pathology. In this study a data base containing 103,887 phoneme occurrences taken from casual conversational American English was obtained through interviews of sixteen adult males and ten adult females. The speech was transcribed using a quasi-phonemic system, known as ARPAbet, plus selected phoneme alternates and was analysed with computer assistance to obtain the rank order of phonemes according to frequency of occurrence. Also, the radius of the confidence interval for the observed frequency of occurrence was calculated at the 95% level for each phoneme. The top ten phonemes (in order, / a, n, t, i, s, r, i, l, d, ε /) account for 47% of all the data. As expected, the results of the present study correlate highly with those of one other major study of natural speech. Comparisons show some interesting differences in detail, however, that appear to be attributable to relatively minor variations in the experimental procedures.
Speech development in the child represents the coemergence of language and a movement system. This paper presents seven basic principles on which a theory of speech development should be formed. Briefly, these principles address developmental changes in musculoskeletal and neural anatomy, continuities in phonetic development, coordination of productive (motor) and perceptual capabilities, rhythmic or cyclic patterning of movement, changing units of phonologic contrast, and interaction of phonetic development with acquisition of a motor skill for speech. These basic principles are in harmony with an autoorganizational theory of language development in which the infant generates, maintains, and transforms patterns of order. Examples of developmental patterns are taken from the literature to illustrate the explanatory value of the autoorganizational theory.
This paper presents a detailed analysis of early lexical and phonological development in three children. The study covers the period from late babbling through the acquisition of 50 conventional words and focuses on: (1) the relationship between prelinguistic and linguistic vocalizations; (2) phonological development after the onset of speech; (3) patterns of lexical selection; (4) rate of lexical acquisition; and (5) use of invented words. The findings reveal that while the prelinguistic utterances of the children were similar, there was extensive inter-subject variation after the onset of meaningful speech, particularly in the segmental and syllabic forms of word productions, patterns of lexical selection, rate of lexical acquisition, and use of invented words.
Several studies have investigated the effect of a particular linguistic environment on infants' discrimination of voicing for stop consonants. Exposure to contrasts phonemic for a community has been said to heighten preverbal infants' sensitivity to these contrasts.
This paper argues that phonetic input cannot be specified and ‘experience’ cannot be defined in this context without knowing how infants perceptually structure speech input. Consequently, the discrimination paradigm provides no test for the effect of experience on infants' speech discrimination. The conditions to be met in order to conclude an effect of experience are outlined.
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