- Often erroneously treated as interchangeable, communication denotes information exchange, communications—the instruments, devices, or media for effecting such exchange… the former a psychobiological (linguistic or other semiotic) concern, the latter an engineering concern (e.g., communications engineer). To understand the significance of such a definitive discrimination as this is to broaden one's appreciation of both concepts and of that portion of the universe to which they relate. The small difference in their orthographic forms and in their phonological forms is misleading, since the sigmatic form is neither the plural of the asigmatic form nor more than coincidentally related to it. Language and Speech are invariably communication affairs… with the exception of the physical transmission of speech, writing, or print, and related technological devices. Communication experts are not necessarily communications experts, and even more noticeably vice versa. See also “A Definition of Speech-sound Analysis, ‘Speech Synthesis,’ and Speech” [49], p. 522, n. 6 (1967). N.B: All undesignated References herewith are those of the author; bibliographical details appear in the Appendix at the appropriate square-bracketed Reference Number, e.g., [49], as above.
- “Infant Cry Sounds: A Visual-Acoustic Analysis Technique” [10], p. 1 (1960); “Cry Sounds of the Newborn Infant” [18a], p. 9 (1961); both paraphrased for aptness here. Reference Number [18a] evolved from [10] and is a part of [18] (1965).
- Ibid.
- Some literature shows the spelling preemie.
- Bertil Johansson and Erik Wedenberg, variously, from c. 1960 on (Stockholm); and see n. 16.
- See n. [10], fig. 11, p. 20 (1960); [18], 1965; and [18a], fig. 28, and fig. text, p. 51 (1961).
- “A Lexicon of Child-Language Vocabulary” [39] (1974).
- Ibid.
- See n. 82 below and related text.
- “A Definition of Speech-sound Analysis, ‘Speech Synthesis,’ and Speech” [49] (1967).
- Newborn Infant Cry [18] (1960–1965).
- Esp. [18a], but also [18c, 18d, and 18e] (1960–1965).
- Esp. [18c], but also [18a, 18d, and 18e] (1960–1965).
- It is, by the way, conventional to treat the neonatal period as the first month of postnatal life, but no such rigidity is explicitly meaningful from infant to infant, and the neonatal courses for individual infants are as varied as are the infants themselves. For instance, the 30 infants of the cited investigation [18a] “varied in gestational age from 34 to 43 weeks, in birth weight from 2,540 to 5,100 gm., [and] in birth length from 46.5 to 55 cm.,… and each [was clinically reported as having had] a normal neonatal course” [18a, p. 11]. The premature infant (or premie) is in many developmental senses a neonate and in some developmental senses a *preneonate. [A *prenate, were there such a term, would be a synonym for foetus, and I have begun to use it in discussions of the prenatally developing offspring.] Neopostnatal denotes the earliest postnatal minutes, literally—that is, the period during which respiration is established and confirmed, practically speaking. Paranatal implies “during natal transition”—i.e., during birth, and a *paranate is, for me, a being-born infant—a developmental stage of explicit significance for my own research interests. Cry is the act of crying—that is, the neuromuscular performance; crysound is the audible sonic result or product or correlate of such act (i.e., cry and crysound are essentially correlates).
- See n. 6 above.
- See n. 5 above and, e.g., Bertil Johansson, Eric Wedenberg, and Björn Westin, “Measurement of Tone Response by the Human Fetus,” Acta Otolaryngolica, LVII (1964), 188.
- See n. 6 above.
- See n. 11 above.
- See n. 6 above.
- “Cry Sounds of the Newborn Infant” [18a], 1961; or, e.g., fig. 1 and fig. 25a of [10] (1960).
- Ibid., fig. 4 and elsewhere.
- For points 3 through 8, cf. n. 50 below and Appendix No. [27] (1967).
- See nn. S and 6 above.
- See n. 10 [49], p. 525 and n. 12 thereof (1967).
- The terminal psychophysiological stages (Conception and Perception), the intermediate neurophysiological, physiological, and biophysical stages (Conversion→Production and Reception→Conversion), and their complex intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships are comprehensively treated in n. 16 and elsewhere on p. 525 of the article cited (1967).
- London, September (1975).
- “Prenatal Speech: Two Definitive Extrapolations” [63] (1975).
- The numerical values identifying resonant-frequency concentrations of energy (known, for the vowels and for certain consonants, as formants); regions of randomly distributed spectral energy corresponding to the various transients known as consonants; and relative overall and componential intensities are hardly a correlative terminology for the jargon of phonetics.
- See n. 10 [49], nn. 3 and 4 thereof (1967).
- Ibid.
- “Synchronized Cineradiography and Visual-Acoustic Analysis” [68], (1961).
- I am concerned that the recordings made by the mother for possible or actual application to therapeutic procedures be made in the language—or languages—predominantly employed by her during the particular relevant pregnancy, as expanded on in the immediately following paragraphs.
- See n. 10 [49], n. 5 thereof (1967).
- R. V. Tonkova-Yampolskaya, “On the Question of Studying the Physiological Mechanisms of Speech,” L'vov Institute for Mother and Child Care (USSR, 1962). [Citations as translated into English.] (I have no further reference for the curious re-citation of Nechayevoy.)
- Ibid.
- Context, where mentioned here, implicates phonetic context, and thus, by definition, orders of linguistic context, since phonetic implicates every linguistic aspect.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- E.g., Orvis C. Irwin and Thatcher Curry, “Vowel Elements in the Crying Vocalization of Infants under Ten Days of Age,” Child Development, XII (1941), 99–109.
- Tonkova-Yampolskaya (1962).
- Ibid.
- Lennart Nilsson and Claes Wirsén, Ett Barn Blir Till (Bonniers, Stockholm, 1965) = A Child Is Born (New York: Dell, 1969) [Dr. Wirsén, Karolinska Institute embryologist]
- Issue of April 30, 1965, entitled “Drama of Life Before Birth,” pp. 54–69.
- Pp. 88, 93, 98, and 120.
- Pp. 92, 102, and 118.
- p. 123.
- Pp. 93 and 122.
- “Prenatal Speech: A Speculation” [27] (1967) (Scheduled lecture to the Director and Staff of the University of Miami Center for Child Development).
- “Prenatal, Neonatal, and Alphabetistic Aspects of Language Acquisition” [29] (Paper presented at a meeting of the International Linguistic Association, May 9, 1970).
- As my redoubtable colleague and Newborn Infant Cry co-author, James Bosma, succinctly reports in his “Prologue to the Symposium” (IV Symposium on Oral Sensation and Perception: Development in the Fetus and Infant, National Institutes of Health, 1973): “In fetal life, when [fetal] nutrition and respiration are accomplished at the placenta, the [fetal] mouth and pharynx are negotiating with the amniotic environment… and manipulating [it]… in [prenatal] rehearsal of [postnatal] swallow, suck, and breath. Because of this [rehearsal], the infant can so readily adapt to the different fluid—air—on the occasion of birth. In this perspective of the portal area, birth is an incident. Correspondingly, the motor gestures of environment manipulation should vary only in dimension, with the same basic synergies in operation which had been employed in the fetus.” Knowing Dr. Bosma's extensive cry function and development mileage, I could expect no less acknowledgment of foetal preparedness from him than the above, in his favorite physiological sector [See also Appendix items 3–10, 18, and 19.]
- See Appendix items [1-40], 1957–1975.
- .: The immediately preceding burden of references (1-40) represents the greatest part of my personal scientific involvement to date with an important part of child-language generation and development, namely, cry; for Cry is the newborn's upper respiratory tract performance during almost the entire awake portion of his entire neonatal course (and well beyond, diminishingly) and, as I have posited, during a large portion of his prenatal course, increasingly, in preparation for the in-air activity and performance conventionally identified as cry. Having produced the first major, comprehensive, technical work on the sound-spectrographic analysis of neonatal cry (see n. 11), I feel it appropriate, for a volume on child language, for me to inventory those increments of CRY involvement, during the past two decades, which have materialized in my own education as a linguist—specifically, an acoustic phonetician—(see Appendix items [41-63], 1956–1975 [actually beginning in 1946])—in the general area of language and speech acquisition in the developing human offspring. It is therefore without total embarrassment that I list, as an Appendix to this particular volume, the disseminable artifacts of my own productivity in the relevant areas of scientific endeavor. These products have run the gamut of conventional and unconventional publications: two books, several articles, several abstracts, two extensive reviews, tapes, cassettes, a phonograph record, X-ray films, limited distribution reports, strictly internal reports, and many recorded lectures. In connection with my National Institutes of Health, United Cerebral Palsy (Research and Educational Foundation), and Association for the Aid of Crippled Children grants and support, I have been specifically involved with cry neonatology as, respectively, Director of Medical Sonics Research of the Wenner-Gren Research Laboratory of Stockholm, Chairman of the Division of Newborn Infant and Phonetic Studies of Communication Research Institute of Coconut Grove and of St. Thomas (Virgin Islands), and tenured full professor of pediatrics (and linguistics and anthropology) with the Mailman Center for Child Development, Department of Pediatrics, University of Miami School of Medicine. The Child Development Center association has persevered for nearly a decade, and my infant cry studies for eighteen years. The recapitulation offered here marks the course of my own neonatological maturation, as a phonetician, linguist, acoustician, and cineradiographer (see Appendix items [64-80], 1957–1975), with regard to the multilevel intricacies of speech and language acquisition. I cannot expect anyone else to assess the phenomenon of” language acquisition” from the same frame of reference that these artifacts and associated involvements have provided me, but perhaps something of their significance—at least to my own development—is apparent in the three respectively chronological inventories of the Appendix. I have, as we say in Texas, “worked long and loud” to understand human speech… its sound domain, its generation and articulation (see Appendix items [41-80]), its linguistic reference, its transmission, and its conception and perception. I have picked up most of these threads already in the neonatal period… (and prenatally, as described above).
- See also n. 110 below and related text.
- Walburga von Raffler-Engel, “The Inadequacy of the Transformational Approach to the Analysis of Child Language,” Word, XXVI (1970), 399.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 395.
- Cf. n. 2 above regarding the cited article. See the following sources: Henry Sweet, Handbook of Phonetics (Oxford, 1877); Edward Wheeler Scripture, The Elements of Experimental Phonetics (New York, 1902); and Acoustico-Cineradiographic Analysis Considerations [44] (Stockholm, 1959). The citations from “Cry Sounds of the Newborn Infant” [18a] are from pp. 9–11, 14, and 43–45.
- Newborn Infant Cry, Conclusions.
- See Appendix item No. [23] (1967), pp. 945–946.
- “The Perception and Common Misperception of Infant Pre-speech,” pp. 943–947 [23] (1967).
- Ibid.
- “Pleniphonetic Transcription in Phonetic Analysis” [46], by comparison. (1962).
- “Cry Sounds of the Newborn Infant” [18a], pp. 17–18 and 57 (1961 < [10], 1960, and in [18] 1965).
- See n. 61 above, pp. 943–947.
- Ibid.
- See n. 10 above.
- Ibid.
- Phonemes are units of sound identification or sound classification, but not of sound per se; they are psychophysical, or even psychophysiological, reference units, as I have insisted in publication and lecture for at least twenty years, and as have many of my reputable predecessors. I do not intend to stress this point here, but my recapitulation and list of references are set out in a comprehensive article cited in n. 10 above.
- See n. 61 above, p. 946.
- “Voiceprinting: Idiovoice versus Idiospeech: Science versus Illusion” [58] (1975). The terms and concept cryprint(s) and cryprinting date to Sept. 10, 1960 and paper [7] and to the subsequent presentations described at Appendix item No. [11]. The implicated concept has contributed immeasurably to the neonatal—and, ultimately, prenatal—speech hypothesis.
- “Voice Recognition by Man, Animal, and Machine” [31] (1971).
- See n. 58 above.
- “Sonocineradiography in Speech-sound Analysis” [79] (1969, 1972).
- Maurice Grammont, “Observations sur le langage des enfants,” Mélanges linguistique offerts à M. Meillet (Paris, 1902), pp. 61–82.
- Werner F. Leopold, Speech Development of a Bilingual Child: A Linguist's Record, 4 vols. (Evanston-Chicago, 1939–49).
- There is no excuse for any serious scholar to write any thing about speech (or pre-speech) development in children without having first devoured the four-volume(!) study of Leopold referenced in my previous footnote. Volume II alone, entitled Sound-learning in the First Two Years (295 pp.) is the most comprehensive examination imaginable of the phonological development of a child during its (her, in this case) first two years. (And the “pre-speech” period, from the first month on, is examined too, and described on the basis of the author's detailed subjective impressions.) Not only is the comprehensiveness of these volumes—or even of just the second volume, itself remarkable, but so also is the author's familiarity with, treatment of, and appreciation for the predecessorial studies relevant to his own magnitudinous work. I shall comment further, in n. 86 below, on these studies referenced by Leopold, as on other and related aspects of his particular study.
- See n. 55 above.
- Walburga von Raffler Engel, Il prelinguaggio infantile (Brescia: Paideia, 1964).
- Von Raffler-Engel, “The Inadequacy of the Transformational Approach,” p. 400. My use of the terms transitional and diachronism above intends reinforcement of the ontogenetic nature of speech development as I see it.
- “From Birth to Age 15: A Case History of Voice Spectrography (Cryprinting and Voiceprinting)” [33] (1972).
- “A Lexicon of Child-Language Vocabulary” [39] (1975).
- Whether of the [dǽD], [brέksəs] (for breakfast), or “oatmilk” [(for oatmeal) strata… and thus the specification: infantile speech—a designative improvement on two counts on child language. See also n. 9 above and the related text.
- Helene W. Harrison, “A Case Study of a Baby's Language Acquisition,” Word, XXVI (1970), 344–361.
- Truly phenomenal.
- I am more than willing to subject the recorded “sixteen hundred complete utterances” to a thorough sound-spectographic analysis [as I had agreed to do with Ruth Weir's recorded data (see the following paragraph of this footnote)—a project devastated by her untimely death]. Such an analysis would provide some control for the perceptual judgments listed at those particular ages, but it would have been of far greater value had the recordings sampled chronologically the thirty-two months reported, rather than been concentrated at the ages indicated. Several of her predecessors have so sampled, as will be specified below.
- See Ruth Hirsch Weir, Language in the Crib (Mouton: The Hague, 1962), 216 pages. This unique and technologically enterprising and innovative, intensive study is, surprisingly, cursorily dispatched by linguist Harrison in a two-line footnote (including the full reference), and similarly for the inimitable, exhaustive Leopold opus (with the afterthought: “Of course, Werner F. Leopold's study of his daughter's bilingual-speech development… remains a classic.”). I have begun a description of his Volume II in n. 77 above, but I must add that Leopold's intratextual chronology of some fifty(!) child-language publications (nine being books) between the years 1877 and 1941 alone; his definitive orientation of crying, crowing, cooing, lalling, babbling, speaking; his sixty-eight-page section on “Analysis of the Child's Sound-System”; his final section on “The Process of Learning Sounds”; and his thorough set of annotated References… all combine to give amateur speech-loggers something to shoot at! (Many Americans have missed Roman Jakobson's 1941 Kindersprache, Aphasie, und Allgemeine Lautgesetze, and thus the prototype in phonemic analysis relevant to language acquisition, but in 1968 the chief obstruction was removed by the Keiler translation into English as Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals, The Hague: Mouton). With the German original long out of print, the translation puts within the reach of English readers not only this famous linguist's early and unique comprehension of the phonological implications of child-speech development but his own child-language bibliography and referential recommendations, e.g.: “The best bibliography of technical literature on child language is found in Brenstiern Pfanhauser (350-356) and in Stern… Yosikazu Ohwaki supplies a list of Japanese contributions”—and similarly regarding pathology.
- “Four” of these “separate sounds” are explained by the mother in an informatory
- No comment.
- In my interspecies communication studies I would term such attitudes “dangerously anthropomorphic” and to be avoided at all costs. Such caution is equally apt for this range of intraspecies study.
- Does Mrs. Harrison know all this for a fact?
- I am aghast.
- Harrison, pp. 360 and 361.
- See n. 55 above.
- Pp. 398 and 396.
- Grant Fairbanks, “An Acoustical Study of the Pitch of Infant Hunger Wails,” Child Development, XIII (1942), 227–232. Reported in [18a] (1961) of [18] (1965).
- Arthur W. Lynip, “The Use of Magnetic Devices in the Collection and Analysis of the Preverbal Utterances of an Infant,” Genetic Psychology Monographs, XLIV (1951), 221–262. Reported in [18a] (1961, 1965).
- See “Cry Sounds of the Newborn Infant” [18a], p. 11 (1961) of Newborn Infant Cry [18] (1965).
- Ibid., pp. 10 and 58.
- Arthur H. Parmelee, Jr., “Infant Speech Development: A Report of the Study of One Child by Magnetic Tape Recordings,” Journal of Pediatrics, XLVI (1955), 447–450. Reported in [18a] (1961) of [18] (1965). Notable quotation (opening line, p. 447): “Infant sounds are not specifically identical with any adult sounds….”
- N. 7 of [18a] (as cited in n. 98 above).
- For example, see Appendix No. [33] (1972).
- Samuel Karelitz et al., “Infants’ Vocalizations and Their Significance,” Proceedings of the First International Conference on Mental Retardation (New York, 1959), pp. 439–446. Reported in [18a] (1961) of [18] (1965).
- Samuel Karelitz, “Infant Vocalization, Part I: The Infant Cry from Birth to Two Years of Age,” Phonograph Record Cl. 2669A (1962).
- See Appendix Nos. [1-6]
- See Appendix Nos. [7-11].
- See Appendix Nos. [12-17].
- See Appendix No. [18].
- See Appendix Nos. [19-40]
- I have just this moment taken the time to listen carefully to the most recent recordings of our sixth child, presently 4; 1 years of age, and I can without reservation insist that, after twenty-nine years of absorption with phonetics, in field and laboratory, there is no way for me to transcribe or describe, to any significant degree of valid and unambiguous detail, the phonetic and other linguistic particulars of these developmental utterances. I can easily produce a phonemic transcription, embellished here and there with narrow phonetic detail, of what I think I hear, but the result is a far cry from the essentially infinite detail of the recorded material. Nothing approaches listening insofar as the fully registered acoustic effect is concerned, and no form of analysis can even begin to approach the visible-sonic details of the sound spectrogram. All other assessment should be relegated to the status of historical museum artifact.
- During my latest years of acoustic phonetic and related research, I find comfort in reading confirmation of my observations in Scripture's words written thirty-one years after the appearance of his own magnum opus (see n. 58 above): “The logical conclusion is: only statements based on measurements are reliable. The corollary is: ‘Statements without measurements are not worth listening to'” (Edward Wheeler Scripture, “Analysis and Interpretation of Vowel Tracks,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, V [1933], 148).
- Henry Truby, “Prenatal Speech: Two Definitive Extrapolations,” Third International Child Language Symposium (London, 1975).
- Ibid.
- For the convenience of researchers, I show here, by author name and date alone, the major child-language works herein cited (and, parenthetically, additional important works referenced by each, respectively): Leopold-II 1947 (Delacroix 1934, Grégoire 1937, Gutzmann 1894, Jakobson 1941, Leopold-I 1939, Lewis 1936, Schultze—on pp. 259–263, 1880, Sully 1904 “study begun 1880“, Tracy 1896 “Bibliography of 105 items, good”, Velten 1943 “First study based on Jakobson”); Weir 1962 (Delacroix, Grégoire, Jakobson, Leopold I-IV 1939–49, Lewis, Stern 1928, Velten); Jakobson 1941, trans. 1968 (Brenstiern Pfanhauser 1930, Delacroix, Grégoire, Gutzmann, Jespersen 1916, Leopold-I, Lewis, Löbisch 1851, Meumann 1903, Ohwaki [no date given], Pavlovic 1920, Preyer 1895, Schultze, Stern, Sully, Tappolet 1907). Each of these works, of course, cites additional respectively pertinent references. Relevantly, Ruth Weir extended her 1962 study of her first son's “presleep monologues” with two years of weekly recordings (remote, wireless microphony of normal daytime activities) of her next two sons (1963-65), and added to the literature a valuable report on their analysis and other matters, entitled “Some Questions on the Child's Learning of Phonology” in The Genesis of Language, pp. 153–168, ed. Frank Smith and George A. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966). Being with IBM San Jose, near Stanford, in those years, I was privileged to share with her many of the considerations complicated by our pyramiding technological and analytic complexities… and increasing families!
WORD
Volume 27, 1971 - Issue 1-3: Child Language--1975