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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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According to the Frame/Content (FC) theory of evolution of speech,
phylogeny and ontogeny of speech have always had in common a "Motor
Frame" - an elevation-depression cycle of the mandible yielding the
mouth close-open alternation manifest in the CV syllable. Infants
begin babbling with a phylogenetically old tendency towards reduplication
of CV cycles and proceed, as in language history, towards the intercyclical
variegation required in languages. In the process, they develop the
syllable as an independent control entity. Infants initially display
three biomechanically based vowel-consonant co-occurrence patterns,
signifying vowel-consonant interdependence, and thus absence of syllable
boundaries. However, languages for the most part do not have these
vowel-consonant co-occurrences indicating, according to FC theory that
syllable boundaries, and thus syllables, gradually evolved. The ontogeny
of syllabification probably recapitulates this phylogeny. Early word-level
phenomena, reflected in language patterns, include tendencies for word-initial
vowels to be central and for utterance-terminal energy to decrease.
Bibliographic reference. MacNeilage, Peter F. / Davis, Barbara L. (2003): "Intersyllabic and word-level regularities in early acquisition", In ICPhS-15, 383-386.