Infant Speech Essay, Research Paper

Since the day we are born we are introduced to speech and language. When we are around 1 or 2 years of age we being to talk. Did you ever stop and think how we really learn how to talk and learn language? People, might think they have an answer to this question. They might answer it yea, your parents thought us how to talk. Those people are right in some ways. My quote from Meyers is from chapter 3 where he states ?children are active thinkers, constantly to construct more advanced understandings of the world.? In this paper I?ll be discussion the following topics: sensitivity to consonants and vowels, what do infants know about words, and recognizing word forms. You might be thinking why would a college student want to write a paper about the way infants speaks. This is because I have a 2-year-old daughter who is a year behind in her speech process.

Infants are born with a remarkable sensitivity to the world?s languages. Newborns start life with the sensitivity to cues that will signify different elements of speech. Within the fist few hours and days of life, infants are able to tell apart excerpts from different language families. At 7 days of age, an infant can distinguish his/her mother?s voice from another women?s voice. Then at 2 weeks an infant can distinguish her father?s voice from another man?s voice. When he/she is at the 3 months of age they can make a vowel sounds. At the age of 4 months an infant raised in a monolingual setting may be able to make out their native language from a very similar unknown language.

When an infant reaches age 6-8 months they can not only separate positively native phonetic contrast, they can also single out phonetic contrasts involving syllable that are not used to decide meaning in their native language. By the end of the first year of life, an infant?s phonetic perceptual sensitivities are a sign of large of influence from the native language. Also by the age on one infant show special dealing out for many other aspects of the native language.

At 15 months, an infant continues to string vowel and consonant sounds together but may imagine real words within the nonsense. The infant may be able to say as many as ten different words. Although infants are learning a lot about words, none of the kinds of word-learning they show in the first year of life automatically indicates they have a full referential understanding of words.

At 4 to 5 months an infant show a favorite for listening to its own names. This suggests that even at this early age, infants beginning to recognize something about word forms. By 7 months of age, when presented with passages containing familiar words, such as ?Cup? infants show a liking for listening to those over new words and can remember heard words for up to two weeks.

We begin life with a broad-based, high level of speech perceptual ability, our ability to produce speech clearly limited by the childishness of both the vocal tract and the related neuromusculayute. Babbling begins to reflect in influence from the native language has been the subject of great argument. Believable data has been collected that infant?s verbal communication do reflect the properties of the native language and that they begin to do so by the 9-10 months of age. BY 10 months of age patterns in infant babbling begging to match to the native language, we see babbling up-and-coming language-specificity we observed in awareness.

Infants were believed to add sounds in a regular and regular way, in essence filling out the organization of a formal phonological system. Now it has been shown that infants do not stop babbling prior to beginning to speech. Although the phoneme inventories used in babbling and speech may not be identical, careful records of children?s making marked clear that those sounds they can clear well in babbling influence those they attempt to make when first producing words. In the initial stages of word learning children do not always produce correctly or again and again even sounds they have mastered in babbling. Another thing is that a child might substitute for one word a sound that she/he seemed unable to produce in a different setting. (Truck duck)

I felt this research was important because it gives an inside to an infant?s mind and how the start learning sound and speech. Also this article was good because it broke down the different stages into different titles and subtitles. While reading this paper I learned a lot about what happeneds when an infant starts to talk or babbles.

I think more research should be done on why some children are lat talkers. I feel this research should be done because my little girl does not talk and I really what to know why.