Catherine Durand’s research while affiliated with Université Paris Cité and other places

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.

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.

In the past ten years, the emergence of speech in infants has been investigated in the framework of theories regarding the capacities underlying speech as part of the biological equipment of man. In particular, studies of the perceptual capacities of neonates have shown the prerequisites for speech perception to be present in infants as early as the first days of life.

Samples of babbling productions of 6-, 8- and 10-month-old infants from different language backgrounds were presented to adult judges whose task was to identify the infants from their own linguistic community. The results show that certain language-specific metaphonological cues render this identification possible when the samples exhibit long and coherent intonation patterns. The segmental indications that are present in the fully syllabic productions of canonical babbling do not allow the judges to identify the infants correctly from their own linguistic community. These results seem to support the hypothesis of an early influence on babbling of the metaphonological characteristics of the target language.