D. Kimbrough Oller

The Role of Audition in Infant Babbling.

The traditional belief that audition plays only a minor role in infant vocal development depends upon evidence that deaf infants produce the same kinds of babbling sounds as hearing infants. Evidence in support of this position has been very limited. A more extensive comparison of vocal development in deaf and hearing infants indicates that the traditional belief is in error. Well-formed syllable production is established in the first 10 months of life by hearing infants but not by deaf infants, indicating that audition plays an important role in vocal development. The difference between babbling in the deaf and hearing is apparent if infant vocal sounds are observed from a metaphonological perspective, a view that takes account of the articulatory/acoustic patterns of speech sounds in all mature spoken languages.

Language and literacy in bilingual children

Section A: Background 1. Assessing the Effects of Bilingualism - D. K. Oller and B.Z. Pearson 2. An Integrated Approach to Evaluating Effects of Bilingualism in Miami School Children - D. K. Oller and R. E. Eilers. Section B: Overall Results on Language use and Standardized Test Performance 3. Bilingualism and Cultural Assimilation in Miami Hispanic Children -R. E. Eilers, D. K. Oller and A. B. Cobo-Lewis 4. Effects of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education on Oral and Written English Skills -A. B. Cobo-Lewis, B. Z. Pearson, R. E. Eilers, and V. C. Umbel 5. Effects of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education on Oral and Written Spanish Skills - A. B. Cobo-Lewis, B. Z. Pearson, R. E. Eilers, and V. C. Umbel 6. Interdependence of Spanish and English Knowledge in Language and Literacy among Bilingual Children - A. B. Cobo-Lewis and R. E. Eilers. Section C: Probe Studies on Complex Language Capabilities 7. Narrative Competence among Monolingual and Bilingual School Children in Miami -B. Z. Pearson 8. Command of the Mass/count Distinction in Bilingual and Monolingual Children -V. C. Mueller Gathercole 9. Grammatical Gender in Bilingual and Monolingual Children - V. C. Mueller Gathercole 10. Monolingual and Bilingual Acquisition -V. C. Mueller Gathercole 11. The Ability of Bilingual and Monolingual Children to Perform Phonological Translation - D. K. Oller and A. B. Cobo-Lewis. Section D: A Retrospective View of the Research 12. Balancing Interpretations Regarding Effects of Bilingualism - D. K. Oller and R. E. Eilers

The effect of position in utterance on speech segment duration in English

The duration of speech segments as a function of position in utterances (initial, medial, final) was studied. In the first experiment seven English speakers read nonsense utterances of the form “say a [bab], say a [babab], say a [babab],” etc. Spectrograms were used to determine the duration of speech segments in the readings. Final syllables were found to be longer than nonfinal syllables. Final‐syllable vowel increments were approximately 100 msec. Final‐syllable consonant increments were less than vowel increments; for instance, absolute final consonant increments were about 20 msec. Also word‐initial consonants were found to be lengthened by 20–30 msec over medial consonants. Subsequent experimentation demonstrated with English nonsense words that (1) final‐syllable and initial‐consonant lengthening occur in utterances with various intonational patterns (imperative, declarative, interrogative); (2) final‐syllable lengthening occurs in word‐final and phrase‐final positions as well as in utterance‐final...

Infant babbling and speech

Previous scholars have claimed that the childs 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 childs 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.

Innateness, Experience, and Music Perception

Musical acculturation from infancy to adulthood was studied by testing the abilities of Western 6-month-olds and adults to notice mistunings in melodies based on native Western major, native Western minor, and non-native Javanese pelog scales. Results indicated that infants were similarly able to perceive native and non-native scales. Adults, however, were generally better perceivers of native than non-native scales. These findings suggest that infants are born with an equipotentiality for the perception of scales from a variety of cultures and that subsequent culturally specific experience substantially influences music perception.

Vocal Atypicalities of Preverbal Autistic Children

This study was designed to evaluate the nature of early vocal behaviors in young children with autism. Recent methodological and conceptual advances in the study of infant preverbal vocalizations were used to provide a detailed examination of the vocal behavior of young preverbal children with autism and comparison children with developmental delays. Results revealed that children with autism did not have difficulty with the expression of well-formed syllables (i.e., canonical babbling). However, children with autism did display significant impairments in vocal quality (i.e., atypical phonation). Specifically, autistic children produced a greater proportion of syllables with atypical phonation than did comparison children. Consistent with prior reports, the children with autism also displayed a deficit in joint attention behaviors. Furthermore, the atypicalities in the vocal behavior of children with autism appeared to be independent of individual differences in joint attention skill, suggesting that a multiple process model may be needed to describe early social-communication impairments in children with autism. Data are discussed in terms of their implications for future theoretical and applied research, including efforts to enhance the specificity of early diagnostic procedures.

What Automated Vocal Analysis Reveals about the Vocal Production and Language Learning Environment of Young Children with Autism.

The study compared the vocal production and language learning environments of 26 young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to 78 typically developing children using measures derived from automated vocal analysis. A digital language processor and audio-processing algorithms measured the amount of adult words to children and the amount of vocalizations they produced during 12-h recording periods in their natural environments. The results indicated significant differences between typically developing children and children with ASD in the characteristics of conversations, the number of conversational turns, and in child vocalizations that correlated with parent measures of various child characteristics. Automated measurement of the language learning environment of young children with ASD reveals important differences from the environments experienced by typically developing children.

Development of precursors to speech in infants exposed to two languages

The study of bilingualism has often focused on two contradictory possibilities: that the learning of two languages may produce deficits of performance in each language by comparison with performance of monolingual individuals, or on the contrary, that the learning of two languages may produce linguistic or cognitive advantages with regard to the monolingual learning experience. The work reported here addressed the possibility that the very early bilingual experience of infancy may affect the unfolding of vocal precursors to speech. The results of longitudinal research with 73 infants aged 0;4 to 1;6 in monolingual and bilingual environments provided no support for either a bilingual deficit hypothesis nor for its opposite, a bilingual advantage hypothesis. Infants reared in bilingual and monolingual environments manifested similar ages of onset for canonical babbling (production of well-formed syllables), an event known to be fundamentally related to speech development. Further, quantitative measures of vocal performance (proportion of usage of well-formed syllables and vowel-like sounds) showed additional similarities between monolingual and bilingual infants. The similarities applied to infants of middle and low socio-economic status and to infants that were born at term or prematurely. The results suggest that vocal development in the first year of life is robust with respect to conditions of rearing. The biological foundations of speech appear to be such as to resist modifications in the natural schedule of vocal development.

The role of prematurity and socioeconomic status in the onset of canonical babbling in infants

The onset of canonical babbling (implying production of well-formed syllables) is a landmark event in the development of the capacity for speech, capping a series of vocal stages of the infants first year of life. Infants who are handicapped with regard to linguistic development are, in some cases, delayed in the onset of speech-like sounds such as canonical syllables. The age of onset of canonical babbling in infants born at risk, either due to prematurity or due to low socioeconomic status (SES) has not been extensively studied. This research, based on a longitudinal investigation of babbling and other motor milestones in term and preterm infants of middle and low SES, indicates that the onset of canonical babbling is robust with regard to such risk factors. Neither preterm infants whose ages were corrected for gestational age, nor infants of low SES were delayed in the onset of canonical babbling. In fact, at corrected ages, the preterm infants appeared to begin canonical babbling earlier than their full-term counterparts. It is suggested that the greater auditory experience of the preterms in this study may account for the early appearance of canonical babbling and hand banging, both of which can be viewed as rhythmic stereotypies that may require auditory feedback for normal development. Other motor milestones studied showed neither delay nor acceleration of onset in the same infants.

Speech-like vocalizations in infancy: an evaluation of potential risk factors [*]

This work reports longitudinal evaluation of the speech-like vocal development of infants born at risk due to prematurity or low socio-economic status (SES) and infants not subject to such risk. Twenty infants were preterm (10 of low SES) and 33 were full term (16 of low SES), and all were studied from 0;4 through 1;6. The study provides the indication that at-risk infants are not generally delayed in the ability to produce well-formed speech-like sounds as indicated in tape-recorded vocal samples. At the same time, premature infants show a tendency to produce well-formed syllables less consistently than full terms after the point at which parents and laboratory personnel note the onset of the canonical babbling stage (the point after which well-formed syllables are well established in the infant vocal repertoires). Further, even though low SES infants produce well-formed speech-like structures on schedule, they show a reliably lower tendency to vocalize in general, as reflected by fewer utterances per minute in recorded samples.