Prenatal and Neonatal Speech, “Pre-speech”, and an Infantile-Speech Lexicon

Abstract

The beginnings of Speech, for a given individual, dramatically precede the birth instant, and demonstrably so. Sound-spectrographic and cineradiographic analysis of neonatal cry and crysound reflects the developmental potential of the Reception aspect of speech in the developing human fetus, which is not only receiving and storing speech features transmitted from the mother but also is “practicing”, in amniotic fluid, those neuromuscular gestures which will lead, in air, to paranatal and neonatal cry and crysound specifically, and to other postnatal vocalization generally. The speech rhythms and patterns and intonations of the pregnant mother will generate receptive physiologic conditioning in the fetally developing unborn child, the natural consequence of which is complementary physiological production conditioning by the progressing fetus, the product of which is observable in the adjacent neonatal period, which in turn discloses vocalization performance indicative of later speech development—not “segmental phonemes”, or anything so phonetically sophisticated relatedly, but the underlying basic intonations, hiatuses, rhythms, and patterns on which the more obvious features of speech are unobtrusively formulated. What is more, deprivation at any developmental stage—as fetus, premie, or neonate—of a continuity of maternal-speech input will be reflected in certain features of the infant's vocalization progress.

Relatedly, “phonetic transcription” (essentially phonemic rather than phonetic, in any case) is inappropriate to the task of pre-speech evaluation, “phonemes” being contrastive reference units only, never directly equatable with sound (or, worse yet, with sounds). In pre-speech development, until there is habituated phone-contrast, there is no phoneme reference in the vocalization explorations of developing- infant speechlike performance. No matter how phonemically obvious certain vocalized continua may appear to be, the differing articulations producing these phonemic samenesses will not produce phonetically same oscillograms or sound spectrograms, the only reliable measuring artifacts in such assessments. Lastly, a Lexicon of infantile-speech is described, wherein developing approximations (not “substitutions”) to mature speech are inventoried associatively with the relevant conventional terms, which appear in familiar alphabetical order.

These suggestions and observations call for professional reconsideration, not only of a fundamental definition of Speech per se, but of phonology, idiolect, lexicon, and Child Language as well, just for openers.