The Development of Speech Production

• Babbling
By the end of the second months, infants begin to do a lot of cooing. Coos are more
varied than cries which is made in the back of the mouth and similar to back vowels and
velar consonants. Babbling begins about 6 to 7 months. Infants first use reduplicated
babbling. They repeat a consonant – vowel sequence, such as “babababa”.
By 11 to12 months, infants use variegated babbling. ,the syllable chains consist of
varying consonants and vowels, such as “bigodabu”. In this time infants begin to impose
sentence like intonation contours and their vocal begin to sound similar to those their native
language (Boyson-Bardies, Halle, Sagart, and Durant,1989).
Babbling is tough to be practiced and mastered various sounds before infants are
used in communication. Some researches think that babbling is noncommunication. They
think that sounds made during babbling are similar to the corresponding sounds made after
babbling. Second reason why babbling is considered as noncommunication is that infants
babble more often when an adult is not present. For example when they are alone in their
crib. It is difficult to say that is communicative acts because there is no one else is present.
• Transition to speech
by the end of the first year, there are two aspects f the infants development begin to merge.
The two aspects are the use of gestures and the mastery of speech sounds in
noncommunicative acts. In this period, the child is capable of using speech sounds to
communicate meaning.
Children begin to use “true” words because there is greater motor control of the speech
apparatus, which is used to make sounds, cognitive maturation which is used to express
communicative intent and the dawning awareness to named things.
Before they can named things correctly, they sometimes use their own symbol to refer the
objects or events surround them. This is called “idiomorphs”. Usually children use their
idiosyncratic words consistently. For example, Hakuta in Carroll (1999) reported that a child
said “Whew” as a way of saying hello to guests. It , actually, turns out that his mother often
greeted him as “Whew! You must have some load in your pants”. This is proved that children
try to draw from their language experience in forming the idiomorphs.
Idiomorphs, according to Carroll (1999), are a traditional stage between babbling and true
words.
• Phonological processes in early words
after first year, children begin to produce recognizable words, although sometimes different
from adult versions.
According to Bloom and Lahey (1978) there are some phonological processes used by
children. They are:
1. Reduction
It occurs when children delete or eliminate sounds. It usually comes on consonant clusters
clusters or clusters occur at the beginning of a word. For example words “small”, “slide”,
and “clock” which are pronounced as [mO], [laid], and [gOk].
2. Coalescence
This occurs when phonemes from different syllables are combined into a single syllable. For
example a word “pacifier” is pronounced as [paf].
3. Assimilation
It occurs when children change one sound to make it similar to another sound in the same
word, such as saying [Zete] for a word”Zeke”.
4. Reduplication
it occurs when one syllable of a multisyllable word is repeat, such as [kiki] for “kitchen”,
[dada] for “daddy”.