Speech Production and Comprehension

I. The development of speech production 

 From vocalization to babbling to speech

1. Vocalization to babbling

Prior to uttering speech sounds, infants make a variety of sounds – crying, cooing,

gurgling. Infants everywhere make the same sounds, even children who are born deaf. The

ability to utter such sounds is unlearned. Around the seventh month, children begin to babble,

to produce what may be described as repeated syllables (syllabic reduplication), e.g; “baba”,

“momo”, “panpan”. While most of the syllables are of the basic consonant + vowel type

(“baba” and “momo”), some consist of closed syllables of the simple consonant+ vowel+

consonant variety (“panpan”). Babbling is a universal stage; all children bablle in the same

way. The sounds that infants make involve many but not all of the speech sounds that occur in

the languages of the world.

2. Babbling to speech

It is from the advanced stage of babbling that children move into uttering their first

words. Often this occurs at around 1 year of age but can occur much earlier or much later.

When children begin to utter words, only some of the sounds that they have uttered in

babbling appear in speech. The other sounds must be reacquired. That is to say, there is a

discontinuity between babbling and meaningful speech. Some psycholinguists explain this

discontinuity by saying that babbling is non- intentional while speech is intentional.

Consonants are acquired in a front to back order (“front” and “back” refer to the origin

of the articulation of the sound). Thus, /m/, /p/, /b/, /t/ and /d/ tend to precede /k/ and /g/.
 Conversely, vowels seem to be acquired in a back to front order, with /ɒ/ and / ɔ:/ preceding

/iː/ and /ʌ/. During this stage, the child produces one word utterances.

3. Telegraphic speech: two and three word utterances

Around 2 years, children begin to produce two and three word utterances. The child can

use one word utterances for many purposes.

E.g. My cup

Mommy chair

Give candy

- Utterances produced at this stage lack function words (articles, prepositions, …). However,

these utterances are close to proper sentences in order. For example, they do not say “Cup

my” but “My cup” even at this early stage.

 Morpheme Acquisition

Once two and three word utterances have been acquired, children start to add function

words and inflections to their utterances. Roger Brown (1973) found that English children

acquire morphemes in the following order: Present progressive – prepositions – plural – past

irregular – possessive – auxiliary to be – articles – past regular.

 Later speech stages: rule formation for negatives and other complex structures

With the production of longer utterances, simple structures are elaborated to yield more

complex ones. Children start to acquire negative sentences, question forms, passives and

relative clauses in this order in their first five years.

- Negation formation

Negation is one of the earliest sentence structure rules acquired by children. According

to psycholinguists, negation is acquired in three main periods.

Period 1: In this period, a negation marker, in the form of “no” or “not” is placed at the

front of an affirmative utterance.

Period 2: In this period , the negative marker tends to appear internally within the utterance

and the auxiliaries “do” and “can” appear with the negation marker.

Examples: “I don’t want it”, “we can’t talk”, “that no mommy”

Period 3: In this period, the auxiliary “be” and the modal “will” appear with negation and

the imperative negatives are formed with “do”

Examples: “you didn’t caught me”, cause he won’t talk”, “I am not a doctor”, “don’t touch

the fish”

Children still make errors at this stage (like in the first example), but their mastery of

negation et this period is nearly complete.

II. The development of speech comprehension

Fetuses and speech input: can speech sounds reach the fetus while it is still in the uterus?

Some researchers, namely Benzaquen et al. (1990), put a microphone inside the uterus

of a pregnant woman to see if speech sounds could reach the ear of the fetus over the

background sounds of the woman’s heartbeat and blood flow. The speech sounds were found

to be able to reach the ear of the fetus. This can explain post-birth preferences of the newborn

baby for the mother’s voice. While this may be enough of a basis for a fetus later to

distinguish among different voices according to pitch or loudness, it is certainly insufficient

for identifying speech sounds.

Speech comprehension occurs without speech production: the case of mute-hearing

children

While the ability to utter speech in appropriate situations is a good indicator of language

knowledge, the absence of the ability to produce speech may not indicate a lack of language

knowledge. A good example is the Irish writer Christopher Nolan. Brain- damaged since

birth, Nolan has had little control over the muscles of his body. Despite his handicap, he
managed to learn language and his writing is of such quality that it has been compared to the

works of Yeats and Joyce. Hence, persons who are mute but hearing can develop the ability to

comprehend speech without being able to comprehend speech.

In normal children speech comprehension develops in advance of speech production

If children did not first learn to understand the meaning of words and sentences, they

would not be able to use words or sentences in a meaningful way. They observe what others

say and how what is said relates to objects. To say that comprehension of a language

necessarily precedes production does not mean a child must understand all of the language

before being able to produce something. Rather, progress goes bit by bit. As the

comprehension of some word, phrase, or grammatical form is learned, some of that learning

may be produced in speech. The two systems of comprehension and production do not

develop separately.