2017.09.06 Prof. Kathleen Wermke

Center for Pre-Speech Development & Developmental Disorders

Bavarian Julius-Maximilians-University

Würzburg, Germany

Profile

Prosodic Primitives in Vocalizations of Infants with Different Mother Tongues

The eyes are the windows of human mind to perceive and process the information in the visual world. Prosodic features such as melody, intensity, and rhythm are essential for an infant acquiring language. There is compelling evidence that infants are sensitive to melodic features of their native language long before speech-like babbling sounds are uttered or first words are produced. Early vocal development is characterized by a universal, unidirected sequence of so-called “vocal stages”, from crying via cooing, marginal and canonical babbling to word and sentence production. Cultural factors, like the ambient language, are known to modify acoustic properties of infant vocalization while the mentioned developmental sequence stays unaffected.

Our cross-cultural infant studies lend support to universal as well as culture (language)- specific phenomena in early vocal behaviour. The presentation will sketch typical vocal phenomena of infants by displaying (graphs and sound) melody /sound patterns. The presentation will sketch early vocalization development in terms of frequency modulation as essential component of tone, of combinatorial complexification of melody structure and of increasing interaction between laryngeal and supra-laryngeal sound production. The development of melodic skills precedes by far any symbolic word use and rule-based grammar constructions and is a rich inventory for a later assimilation of intonation prototypes in speech.