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Adaptation to language: Evidence from babbling and first words in four languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies and
Marilyn May Vihman
Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies*
Affiliation:
C.N.R.S .-E.H.E.S.S
Marilyn May Vihman*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
*
Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, CNRS-EHESS-Université Paris V-EPHE, 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France
Marilyn May Vihman, Educational Psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903
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Abstract

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.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , June 1991, pp. 297 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

We gratefully acknowledge support from NSF grant BNS 85–20048 to Charles A. Ferguson. with the participation of Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies. Björn Lindblom, and Marilyn May Vihman. For their considerable assistance in the collection, transcription, and analysis of the children's data we thank Marlys A. Macken. Ruth Miller, and Hazel Simmons for English. Liselotte Roug-Hellichius and Ingrid Landberg for Swedish. Catherine Durand for French, and Fumiko Arao for Japanese. We also thank three anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

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