Prelexical phonetic and early lexical development in German-acquiring infants: canonical babbling and first spoken words

ABSTRACT

Prelexical phonetic capacities have widely been described to be a precursor for later speech and language development. However, studies so far varied greatly in the measurements used for the detection of canonical babbling onset or the description of infants’ phonetic capacities at one or more set time points. The comparability of results is, therefore, questionable. Thus, the aims of this study were to investigate the associations between (1) different measurements of CBO, (2) different aspects of phonetic capacity at the age of 9 months and (3) age of CBO and phonetic capacities at 9 months. A further aim (4) was to explore whether one of the measures would be suitable to predict the age of word onset (WO) in 20 healthy German-acquiring individuals. The data were derived from monthly recorded spontaneous speech samples between 0 and 18 months. It was found that the different applied prelexical measures equally well serve as valid estimators for the detection of CBO or of infants’ phonetic capacities. Further, age of CBO and phonetic capacities at 9 months were significantly associated even though the age of CBO did not reliably predict phonetic capacities. Prelexical measures and WO were not related. Reasons for no indication of a significant association are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Canonical babbling
• German
• infant
• phonetic capacities
• word onset

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the participating families for their cooperation and trust. We wish to thank Silvia Gosewinkel (SLT) for providing the second transcription for the investigation of interrater reliability. This project was supported by Deutscher Bundesverband für Logopädie e.V., Hildegardis Verein e.V. and Kirchhof-Stiftung.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interests.